The Struggle to Define a Nation: Rethinking Religious Nationalism in the Contemporary Islamic World 9781463206420, 1463206429

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The Struggle to Define a Nation

The Modern Muslim World

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Series Editorial Board

Marcia Hermansen Hina Azam Ussama Makdisi

Martin Nguyen Joas Wagemakers

Advisory Editorial Board

Talal Asad Khaled Abou El Fadl Amira Bennison Islam Dayeh Marwa Elshakry Rana Hisham Issa

Tijana Krstic Ebrahim Moosa Adam Sabra Armando Salvatore Adam Talib

This series provides a platform for scholarly research on Islamic and Muslim thought, emerging from any geographical area and dated to any period from the 17th century until the present day. 

The Struggle to Define a Nation

Rethinking Religious Nationalism in the Contemporary Islamic World

Edited by

Marco Demichelis Paolo Maggiolini

gp 2017

Gorgias Press LLC, 954 River Road, Piscataway, NJ, 08854, USA www.gorgiaspress.com Copyright © 2017 by Gorgias Press LLC

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise without the prior written permission of Gorgias Press LLC. ‫ܘ‬

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2017

ISBN 978-1-4632-0642-0

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Cataloging-in-Publication Record is Available from the Library of Congress. Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents ..................................................................................... v About the Contributors ......................................................................... vii Introduction. The Struggle to Define a Nation: Rethinking Religious Nationalism in the Contemporary Islamic World .... 1 MARCO DEMICHELIS AND PAOLO MAGGIOLINI 1. Religious Nationalism in the Official Culture of MultiConfessional Lebanon .................................................................. 17 ALEXANDER D. M. HENLEY 2. Syria’s Lebanonization: An Historical Excursus within the ‘Non-Existence’ of Syrian National Identity ............................. 45 MARCO DEMICHELIS 3. Nation-Narrating Monarchies: The Religious ‘Soft Power’ of the Moroccan and Jordan Kings ................................................. 75 MENNO PREUSCHAFT 4. Saudi National Identity: Historical and Ideational Dimensions..................................................................................... 95 ELENA MAESTRI 5. Religion and Nationalism: Palestinian Christians and Religious Leadership in the Midst of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict..........................................................................................123 PAOLO MAGGIOLINI 6. ‘Under the Same Flag’: The Copts of Egypt and the challenges of Nasserist Nationalism .........................................161 ALESSIA MELCANGI 7. The Loner Desperado: Oppression, Nationalism and Islam in Occupied Palestine ......................................................................195 ILAN PAPPE 8. Self-Sacrifice and Forgiveness: Religion and Nationalism in the New Israeli and Palestinian Cinema ..................................221 YAEL BEN-ZVI MORAD v

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9. Religion and Nation Building in Turkey: The Role of Institutionalized Religion in the Case of Diyanet ....................251 GÜL ŞEN 10. Jundallah and Radical Religious Nationalism ............................277 FATEMEH SHAYAN 11. Nationalism and Islamism as Opposing Determinants of Iranian National Identity ............................................................311 ALAM SALEH 12. Evolving Face of Pakistan’s Religious Nationalism .................341 RAJA MUHAMMAD ALI SALEEM 13. The Limits of Secular Nationalism: Revisiting the Politics of Islam and National Identity in Bangladesh .............................373 HUMAYUN KABIR 14. The Broken Mirror: How the Contemporary Jihadist Narrative is Re-Shaping the Classical Doctrine of Jihad........409 RICCARDO REDAELLI 15. Emerging Trends in the Broader Jihadi Galaxy: Between Radicalization and New Models of Jihadism ..........................439 ANDREA PLEBANI 16. Conclusion 1: From the Nahda to Nowhere? ...........................469 PAOLO BRANCA 17. Conclusion 2: Democracy, Nationalism and Religion in the Arab World ...................................................................................497 YOUSSEF M. CHOUEIRI

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS Alexander D. M. Henley Dr Alexander D. M. Henley is a Lecturer in Islam and the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Theology & Religion, and tutor at Pembroke College. He comes to Oxford from a four-year stint in the United States, where he held fellowships at Georgetown and Harvard Universities, along with one-semester visiting fellowship at the Brookings Doha Center. He completed his PhD in Arab World Studies at the University of Manchester, having previously studied at the Universities of Durham, Edinburgh and Damascus. His research focuses on modern Lebanese history, with interests in the intersection of religion, politics and conflict. Marco Demichelis Dr. Marco Demichelis was a Research Fellow in Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern History at the Department of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Milan, and now has recently won a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship at the University of Navarra. He gained a PhD in History of Islamic Thought at the University of Genoa (MA Dalarna University, MA University of Turin, BA University of Turin) and a Visiting at the MacMillan Center at the University of Yale (Council of Middle Eastern Studies, 2014). His main focus is on the historical evolution of Islamic Thought in the early modern and contemporary eras.
 Menno Preuschaft Dr.phil. Menno Peruschaft is currently Head of the Preventions Department of Radical Salafism and anti-Muslim Racism at the Council of Crime Prevention in Lower-Saxony (Germany). He has previously been a research fellow at the University of Muenster. vii

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His PhD-Thesis on Saudi National Dialogue and religious identity was awarded the DAVO-dissertation prize in 2014. Elena Maestri Dr. Elena Maestri qualified as an Associate Professor in 2012 in Italy and currently teaches History and Institutions of the Muslim World at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences of the Catholic University of the S. Heart in Milan. Her research is mainly focused on Gulf Arab States’ history and societies, development and cooperation in the Arab world, Islam and gender issues, the old and the new Arab media. She has participated in many international conferences on topics related to her research fields and authored many specialized studies and articles both in Italian and in English. Paolo Maggiolini Dr. Paolo Maggiolini is a Research Fellow at the Catholic University of S. Heart, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. He is also adjunct Professor of Regional Studies – Middle East and History of Islamic Asia, Faculty of Language Sciences and Foreign Literature and Associate Fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. His research is mainly focused on religion and politics in the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean context, with particular concentration on Israel, Jordan and Palestine, Arab Christianity in the Middle East, and the relationship between religion, national identity and nationalism. Alessia Melcangi Dr. Alessia Melcangi is a Research Fellow at the Center of Research on the Southern System and the Wider Mediterranean (CRiSSMA) of the Catholic University of the S. Heart, Milan and Adjunct Professor in History of the Middle East at University of Florence, Faculty of Political Science. She has published academic articles in relevant peer review journals, such as Africa, Nova Collectanea Africana in addition to different papers in edited works. She is the author of “I copti nell’Egitto di Nasser. Tra politica e religione (1952–1970)” (Italian, Carocci, 2017, forthcoming).

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Ilan Pappe Professor Ilan Pappe is the director of The European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. He is the author of 20 books on the history of the modern Middle East and Israel/Palestine. His recent book is The Ten Myths of Israel (London, 2017). Yael Ben-Zvi Morad Dr. Yael Ben-Zvi Morad is a researcher of Israeli and Palestinian Cinema and Literature. She teaches at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and is the author of the books Patricide: Gender and Nationalism in Palestinian Cinema (Hebrew, 2011) and Wedding in the Snow (Hebrew, 2008). Gül Şen Dr. Gül Şen is a Lecturer at the Department of Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Languages at the University of Bonn. She is the author of Die Entwicklung zivilgesellschaftlicher Strukturen in der Türkei (2002–2010) – Transformation des türkischen politischen Systems von einer Elitendemokratie hin zu einer partizipativen Demokratie (Berlin, 2013). Fatemeh Shayan Dr. Fatemeh Shayan is a lecturer at Isfahan University, Iran, and a post-doctoral scholar of International Relations at the University of Tampere (UTA), Finland. She completed her doctoral study, along with many academic publications in international journals, in the Faculty of Management at UTA, and defended her dissertation in December 2014. She was also a researcher at UTA during 2013– 2014. Alam Saleh Dr. Alam Saleh is a lecturer in Middle Eastern Politics at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, United Kingdom. He is a council member of the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies and Reviews Editor of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies. Dr. Alam Saleh received his BA, MA, and PhD from the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. Saleh is Fellow of Higher Education Academy and he has previously taught undergraduate and graduate courses

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on International Relations, Security Studies and Middle East Politics at Durham, Leeds, and Bradford Universities. Raja Muhammad Ali Saleem Dr. Raja Muhammad Ali Saleem, an assistant professor at Forman Christian College (Pakistan), has degrees from the universities of Pakistan, the US, the UK and Canada and has over twenty years of diverse experience, working for the Government of Pakistan, Asian Development Bank, UNDP, among others. Dr Saleem has taught in the US and Pakistan and his reviews, articles, and chapters have been published by the Journal of International Commerce, Economics and Policy, Party Politics, Oxford University Press, Durham University, and others. Palgrave-Macmillan is publishing his first book, State, Nationalism and Islamization: Historical Analysis of Turkey and Pakistan in 2017. Humayun Kabir Humayun Kabir obtained his PhD in an interdisciplinary field from Hiroshima University. Prior to his current teaching position at North South University, Dhaka, he held research and faculty positions at Hiroshima University, Hiroshima Jogakuin University, and University of Tsukuba, Japan. His research interests include a wide range of issues in contemporary Islam including madrasa and ulama (Islamic scholars), Islam and democracy, and Muslim minority communities in South Asia. Riccardo Redaelli Professor Riccardo Redaelli is the Director of the Masters’ in Middle Eastern Studies (MIMES) of the Graduate School for Economy and International Relations (ASERI), and Director of the Center for Research on the South and the Wider Mediterranean System (CRiSSMA), Catholic University of the S. Heart, Milan (Italy), where he teaches Geopolitics, the History of Asia and Post Conflict and Emergency Management. Andrea Plebani Dr. Andrea Plebani is a Research Fellow at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and Associate Fellow at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. His research focuses on socio-

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political and security issues related to the broader Middle-East as well as on the evolution of the Islamist galaxy. His publication include: Andrea Plebani, Jihadismo globale. Strategie del terrore tra Oriente e Occidente (Global jihadism. Strategies of terror between East and West), Giunti, 2016; Andrea Plebani (ed.), Jihad e terrorismo. Da al-Qa ‘ida a ISIS. Storia di un nemico che cambia (Jihad and terrorism. From al-Qa‘ida to ISIS), Mondadori, 2016; Andrea Plebani (ed.), New (and old) patterns of jihadism: al-Qa‘ida, the Islamic State and beyond, ISPI, 2014; Andrea Plebani – Omar Al-Ubaydli (eds), GCC relations with post-war Iraq: a strategic perspective, Gulf Research Center, 2014; Andrea Plebani – Riccardo Redaelli, L’Iraq contemporaneo (Contemporary Iraq), Carocci, 2013. Paolo Branca Paolo Branca is Associate Prof. of Arabic and Islamic Studies within the dept. of Religious Studies at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Milan. On the relationship between Islam and the modern world, he has published: Voci dell’Islam moderno: il pensiero arabo-musulmano fra rinnovamento e tradizione, (Genova, 1991), Introduzione all’Islam, (Milano, 1995), I musulmani, (Bologna, 2000), Il Corano, (Bologna, 2001), Yalla Italia! Le vere sfide dell’integrazione di arabi e musulmani nel nostro Paese, (Roma, 2007) and, with Barbara de Poli and Patrizia Zanella, Il sorriso della Mezzaluna, (Roma, 2011). He translated the novel of the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Nagib Mahfuz, Vicolo del Mortaio, (Milano, 1989). Youssef M. Choueiri Professor Youssef M. Choueiri obtained his PhD from Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, in Middle Eastern History. He is Director-General, Centre for Arab Unity Studies, Reader in Islamic Studies at the University of Manchester, and Professor in Modern Arab & Middle Eastern History at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Prior to his current positions, he held research and faculty positions at the Universty of Exeter and the Centre for Lebanese Studies, Oxford. His recent publications include: ‘Arabness, Arab Jews and the Arab Spring’, chapter in Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations, Ed. Yousef Meri, (Routledge, 2016). The Handbook is scheduled to be published in English, Arabic and French at the same time, in addition to an

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electronic edition. ‘The Romantic Discourse of Ameen Rihani and Percy Shelley’, chapter in The Book of Khalid: Critical Edition, Ed. Todd Fine, (Syracuse University Press, 2016).

INTRODUCTION. THE STRUGGLE TO DEFINE A NATION: RETHINKING RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM IN THE CONTEMPORARY ISLAMIC WORLD MARCO DEMICHELIS AND PAOLO MAGGIOLINI

‘Religious Nationalism’ looks like a Lernaean-Hydra with two heads, well separated, but working in unison. This image can be interpreted by deconstructing two fundamental notions that shaped the traditional understanding of nation and nationalism, in accordance with Western parameters. On the one hand, it is possible to reconsider this mythic association from the perspective of the principles una religio, in uno regno (one religion, in one realm) and cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion), as emerged after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which ended the first German religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants within the Holy Roman Empire. On the other, it transmits the idea that a nation belongs to a unique ethnos with a definite geography – an idiomatic language – while religion represents a strategic cultural repository from which to select themes and traditions that allow nationalism to ‘imagine’ 1 the existence of an immutable nation, which in turn could acquire the profile of a ‘religion’. 2 These two Anderson Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London, 1991), p. 7. 2 Philip Barker, Religious Nationalism in Modern Europe, (London, 2008), pp. 22–23. 1

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aspects did not diverge. The tendency to impose a sharp separation and distinction between them is frequently artificial, failing to understand when religious identity became ‘nationally’ salient and vice-versa. 3 Indeed, blurring together ethnos (a group of people with a common descent) and religio (binding or linking them together again) concurs to conceptualize the ‘nation’ and the state which, in turn, coalescing and overlapping, gives sense to nationalist ideals and their historical incarnation, 4 forging the identity and large-scale political solidarity of a nation (natio, ‘native’) with the aim of creating, legitimizing or challenging a state. 5 Accordingly, this broad spectrum of possible interconnections, overlapping and coalescing between these concepts, describes the trajectory of a process that constantly redefines the relationship between politics and religion within the public space, the understanding of the nation and the realm of the state. This volume analyses the issue of ‘religious nationalism’ and the ‘nationalization’ of religion along with the path of the interaction between nationalism, religion and territory from multiple perspectives, case studies, religious affiliations and denominations of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The decision to also include Arab Christianity intends to underline the scale and the complexity of the phenomena analysed, scrutinizing the conviction that religious nationalism can be present only where hegemonic religions exist or among non-hegemonic religious communities as a

Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood. Ethnicity, Religions and Nationalism, (Cambridge, 1997), p. 185f; Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, (Cambridge, 1990), p. 48f; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, (Oxford, 1983); Joseph R. Strayer, Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History, (Princeton, 1971). 4 Timothy D. Sisk (ed.), Between Terror and Tolerance: Religious Leaders and Conflict Management, (Baltimore, 2011), p. 4. 5 Anthony Marx, Faith in Nation: Exclusionary Origins of Nationalism, (New York, 2003), p. 6; Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, (Cambridge, 1990). 3

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form of socio-political and territorial separatism. 6 At the same time, this book proposes to go beyond the simplistic idea that religion in politics and religious nationalism necessarily tend to forms of violence or to illiberal political projects, although these dimensions are not ignored. 7 In fact, religion and religious leaderships possess an intrinsic ‘ambivalence’ and they can make a determinant contribution to the development of inclusive and tolerant or exclusive and intolerant forms of nationalism. 8 The issue at the core of the book is not just the emergence of forms of politicized religions within specific religious traditions or suggesting that ‘religious nationalism’ could be the Islamic version of a de-Westernized ideal. The aim is to reconsider the connection between nationalism, religion and territory, focusing on the ongoing debate between different communities of the so-called Islamic World 9 regarding the nature of the nation and state, and the role of religion in a nation-state’s institutional ground, both as a Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof, The Invention of Religion Rethinking Belief in Politics and History, (London, 2002), p. 8; Mark Juergensmeyer, ‘The Worldwide Rise of Religious Nationalism’, Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 50/1 (1996); Roger O. Friedland, ‘Religious Nationalism and the Problem of Collective Representation’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 27 (2001), pp. 125–152. 7 Scott R. Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (Lanham, 1999), p. 10; Atalia Omer, Jason A. Springs, Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook, (Santa Barbara, 2013), p. 8; David Little, ‘Religion, Nationalism and Intolerance’, in Between Terror and Tolerance: Religious Leaders and Conflict Management, Ed. T. D. Sisk, (Baltimore, 2011), p. 12. 8 Scott R. Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation, (Lanham, 1999), p. 10. 9 Although the volume employs the image of the Islamic World to give sense to the inclusion of the various and distant experiences collected in the following pages, the analysis takes its distance from all the epistemological and cultural paradigms conventionally associated with this representation, the ideal typical ‘other’, according to the Western self-projection, especially for the relation between religion and politics. 6

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viable integrative or segregating factor. 10 Indeed, it is by focusing on the state dimension, as the subject of collective action or sociocultural and political representation, that the book proposes to reconsider the relationship between religion, politics and identity in the perspective of ‘religious nationalism’ and the ‘nationalization’ of religion in the contemporary Islamic World. 11 In fact, without negating the intrinsic universalistic and supranational framework of religion, the imposition of the logic of the modern nation-state triggered and still sustains the development of redefining and repositioning religious institutions and movements, according to this schema, giving birth to a process of ‘nationalizing’ religion. At the same time, this could be the uneven result of religion’s influence and impact on the structuring of the ideal and concept of nation. Accordingly, although the conventional ideal of what the ‘nation-state’ and ‘nationalism’ is imposes acceptance of the secularist principle, as progressively developed through the historical vicissitudes originating in premodern Western Europe, the simple replication of such a projection distorts the analysis and removes the chance to creatively reconsider the relationship between nationalism, religion and territory under different perspectives. Nonetheless, the book does not search for the ‘success story’ in order to demonstrate the validity or existence of the mythic Lernaean-Hydra ‘religious John Coakly, ‘Religion and Nationalism in the First World’, in Ethonationalism in the Contemporary World: Walker Connor and the Study of Nationalism, Ed. Daniele Conversi, (London, 2002), pp. 215–216. 11 For an overview of different definitions of religious nationalism, see for instance: Mark Juergensmeyer, The New Cold War? Religious Nationalism Confronts the Secular State, (Berkley, Los Angeles, London, 1994); Roger O. Friedland, ‘Religious Nationalism and the Problem of Collective Representation’, Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 27 (2001); Barbara-Ann J. Rieffer, ‘Religion and Nationalism: Understanding the Consequences of a Complex Relationship’, Ethnicities, Vol. 3 (2003); Olivier Roy, La Sainte Ignorance. Le temps de la religion sans culture, (Paris, 2012), p. 125; Scott W. Hibbard, Religious politics and Secular states. Egypt, India, and the USA, (Baltimore, 2010); Philip Barker, Religious Nationalism in Modern Europe, (London, 2008). 10

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nationalism’ somewhere in the so-called Islamic World. This concept is the investigative tool of the book that helps to unveil a much more complex reality and possible interaction than is usually considered to exist in the relationship between nationalism and religion, where the universal and the territorial do not just coexist or tolerate each other but can mutually reinforce and benefit one another, giving shape to original socio-political experiences and projects.

THE ISLAMIC WORLD AND THE PROJECTION OF THE EUROPEAN-TAILORED IDEAL OF THE NATION STATE

As argued by the most important experts in ‘Arab Nationalism’, such as Bassam Tibi, Charles Kurzman or Rashid Khalidi, 12 the idea that a modern state corresponds to a geography wherein the majority of the population is affiliated to one faith, one culture, one ethnic group belongs – at least from the late Middle Ages – to Europe. On the contrary, the history of the so-called Islamic World seems clearly dominated by the ideal of empire as an expression of a perfect principle of pure inclusion until the end of the 19th century. In fact, the Umayyad (661–750) and Abbasid (751–1258) empires and, thereafter, the gunpowder empires – specifically the Ottoman (1299–1923) and the Mughal (1526–1857) – founded part of their legitimacy on accepting and integrating different ethnolinguistic and religious groups within their borders. Therefore, they were more similar, as political and institutional structures, to the modern eastern European kingdoms (Russia’s Romanov and Austrian’s Habsburg). Indeed, the insertion and spreading of modern nation-state ideals and principles and, thereafter, of the notion of secularization appear widely the result of Western-centric Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism, between Islam and the Nation-State, (New York, 1997), p. 29; Akram Fouad Khater, Sources in the History of Modern Middle East, (New York, 2004), p. 109; Charles Kurzman, Modernist Islam 1840–1940, a Sourcebook, (Oxford, 2002); Rashid Khalidi, The Origins of Arab Nationalism, (New York, 1991). 12

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projection by means of colonialism and imperialism. From this standpoint, the Safavid dynasty could be considered quite an exception. The Safaviyya was a Sufi order founded by the Kurdish mystic Safi al-Din al-Ardabili (1252–1334). A disciple of Shaykh Zahid, leader of a local confraternity, and husband of his daughter, Safi ad-Din al-Ardabili became his successor and renamed the sect. Starting from a multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic perspective (the Safavid ancestry is populated by Azerbaijani, Kurds, Persians and Turkmen who intermarried with Georgians, Circassians and Pontic Greeks), the Safaviya reframed Iranian identity, rooting it within a new understanding of Shi‘a religious affiliation and its role. 13 This new Iranian identity was modeled by combining important historical and cultural specificities. The ideal of Persia as a single and distinct socio-political and cultural unit, which was already widespread many centuries before Islam, coalesced with an essentially new interpretation of Shiism, which was imposed by the new dynasty in antithesis to a largely Sunni population, resembling the principle of cuius region, eius religio. Indeed, this appears to be an association between geography, religion and politics not so different from what developed within Western Europe. These historical examples well represent the complexity of reconsidering the development of the ideal of nation states and nationalism within the so-called Islamic World. Focusing on the Ottoman Empire, it is clear, however, that in the postEnlightenment phase and during the apex of European colonialism within the Middle East, a convergence began developing towards the modern Western concept of nation, which was previously nonexistent. This dynamic proceeded in different contexts, initially taking root within religious minorities and urbanized environments. 14 Andrew J. Newman, Safavid Iran. Rebirth of a Persian Empire, (London, 2006), p. 24f; Douglas E. Streusand, Islamic Gunpowder Empires, (Boulder, 2011), p. 135f; Roger Savory, Iran under the Safavid, (Cambridge, 1980). 14 Albert Hourani, ‘Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables’, in Beginning of Modernization in the Middle East, the Nineteenth 13

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Of course, Ottoman internal administrative reforms also contributed to its development. More in detail, the 18th century was a turning point from this perspective. During this period the Empire was increasingly involved in numerous internal and external political and military conflicts that progressively threatened its existence. 15 Indeed, at the beginning of the 19th century, Istanbul reacted by promoting a wide and complex program of reforms, the Tanzimat (Reorganization), which in turn triggered the development of new social constructs and the reconfiguration and redefinition of the significance of Ottoman identity behind which stood a complex dynamic of intertwining and overlapping religious, political and economic factors. This dynamic reached its apex during the Hamidian era when a process of standardizing Islamic belief developed along with and in support of the centralization and rationalization of the Ottoman state. 16 This had the effect of ideologizing Islam, ‘fusing the notion of loyalty to the state with loyalty to Islam’, 17 setting the framework for a specific understanding of modernity and nation-state that clearly differed from those of secular nationalists, albeit after the Great War the latter seemed to be the leading force of the Middle East’s nationalist movements. The historical decade that preceded the Great War further clarified all the problems that the Ottoman Empire had been unable to solve in the previous century. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 – with restoration of the 1876 constitution and Century, Eds. William R. Polk, Richard L. Chambers, (Chicago, 1968), pp. 41–68; Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism. The politics of Damascus 1860–1920, (Cambridge, 1983). 15 Kemal H. Karpat, ‘The Transformation of the Ottoman State, 1789–1908’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 3/3 (1972), p. 245; Donald Quataert, The Ottoman Empire 1700–1922, (Cambridge, 2006), p. 65. 16 James L. Gelvin, ‘Secularism and religion in the Middle East. Reinventing Islam in a World of Nation-States’, in The Invention of Religion: Rethinking Belief in Politics and History, Eds. Derek R. Peterson, Darren R. Walhof, (London, 2002), p. 122. 17 Ibid., p. 122.

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the deposition of Abdul Hamid a year later, after an attempted counter-coup – accelerated the public debate over the political and cultural loyalties of the ‘nations’ within the Empire. Following the Committee of Union and Progress’ (CUP) commitment to the concept of Ottomanism, the Young Turks believed that the best way to restore the vitality of the domain was through a constitutional government that would limit the power of the monarch and guarantee the rights of non-Muslims, incorporating them within the Ottomanist framework. 18 In fact, one of the first acts of the new parliamentary government was to abolish the millet system in order to limit sectarian religious impact on the Empire’s unity. On the contrary, the CUP also continued to stress Islamic symbols to reinforce its own claims to legitimacy, supporting the caliphate as the institutional expression of religious authority. However, this double-standard attitude amplified a schizophrenic approach. This is because they abolished, but only in theory, the religious distinction between Muslim rulers and non-Muslim subjects for the political-tactical purpose of eliminating (but without success) the factors that were encouraging national separatist movements within the Empire. The failure became evident in subsequent years. Shortly after the CUP’s internal victory, Bulgaria proclaimed its definitive independence, the Austrian empire annexed Bosnia, Crete declared unity with Greece and Italy invaded the North African coast, occupying a part of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in addition to Rhodes and other small islands in the Aegean. After Istanbul signed the Treaty of Tripoli with Italy in 1912, Albania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro drove most Ottoman forces out of Europe during the first Balkan War in 1912–1913. Istanbul’s territory was reduced from 169,000 km2 to less than 28,000 km2 and its population from 6.1 to 1.9 million. Ottomanism was failing but the CUP did manage to generate a new awareness of the importance of Anatolian Turkish identity. At the same time, within the Arab territories of the Empire, during the 19th century the progressive development of the Nahda, William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, (Boulder, 2004), p. 137f. 18

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an attempt at cultural and religious reform, and later on, in 1913, the Arab Congress in Paris, gave official voice to the first Arab nationalist aspirations. Nevertheless, the majority of the population in the Levant remained deeply loyal to Istanbul. At the outbreak of WWI, a large part of the Arab population and elite assumed a proOttoman position, and many of them fought on Istanbul’s side on the different war fronts, at Gallipoli as in the Caucasus. The Arab nationalist project immediately separated into two different positions. One symbolically headed by Shakib Arslan (1869–1946), was more Ottomanist and religiously oriented. The other was inspired by Sati’ al-Husri (1882–1968) who encouraged a more secular-nationalist society. These are therefore the roots of a conflict continuing throughout the 20th century between what have traditionally been described as ‘conservative’ and ‘modernist’ outlooks. This contraposition is still gripping Islamic societies and specifically the Arab world. A sort of perennial divergence in large part reinforced by the incoherent European position and its colonialist appetite that after the end of Great War, which boosted the Anglo-French Mandate system against the previous agreements signed with the Arab intelligentsia that had fought against Istanbul. The denial of the right to self-determination, as clarified in Wilson’s 14 Points and in the Arab requests summarized by the King-Crane Commission in 1919, was symptomatic of the European colonial policy’s impact on the region, which in turn further triggered and reinforced the clash and contraposition between an Arab secularist ideal and a more religious-rooted political approach during the entire 20th century. The historical phase that followed the implosion of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the Caliphate (1924) and the establishment of the mandate system in the Mashrek led to a struggle for independence that, for the majority of the Arab countries, only ended after WWII. As reported by William L. Cleveland, the authoritarian reforms in Turkey under Mustapha Kemal (1881–1938) and in Iran, under Reza Shah (1878–1944), brought the formation of two autocratic regimes, ‘legitimized’ because they were able to grant and preserve the independence of their respective countries in comparison with the Arab areas under

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the Anglo-French occupation. 19 This understanding was valid also for cases such as Egypt. Although this country had acquired a sort of autonomy already in the 1920s, Cairo was, in fact, subject to London’s influence so that Great Britain’s political and economic guidelines were still able to orient and determine important internal decisions. Consequently, in opposition to a still liberal and intellectual form of patriotism with leftist inclinations, during the 1920s and 1930s, part of the Arab world saw in the European nationalist experiences, especially those with fascist tendencies, the ideological means to ferry their countries from colonialism to the age of self-determination. 20 During the same decades a third actor entered the regional political space: the Muslim Brotherhood; an Islamic association based on strong social activism, communitarianism, and religious praxis in the public space and with a populist propensity. During the two World Wars, anti-colonial insurrections occurred within the entire Arab world, from Iraq, with the internal revolt of 1920 and the Shi‘a insurrection of 1935–36, to Syria, with the Great Revolt of 1925–1926, and Palestine with the riots of 1929 and the revolt of 1936–1939. However, the search for identity in an area reshaped by European powers, with borders never existing before and a geographical partition established, according to European geopolitical interests, gave rise to a form of Arab Nationalism as yet devoid of concrete historical and political maturity. The new borders designed by European diplomats emphasized the contraposition between forms of patriotism rooted in specific territorial contexts versus pan-Arab ideology, but also between a secular-nationalist approach and a religiously identifying chauvinism, usually quite anti-Christian. On the one hand, protagonists like Antun Sa‘adah (d. 1949), the Christian Lebanese founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party and architect of the Greater Syria ideology, and Sati al-Husri (d. 1968), author of the William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, p. 175. Israel Gershoni, James Jankowski, Confronting Fascim in Egypt. Dictatorship versus Democracy in the ’30s, (San Francisco, 2009); Donald Malcolm Reid, Cairo University of the Making of Modern Egypt, (Cambridge, 1990). 19 20

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important works Arabism first, On Arab Nationalism and What is Nationalism? argued that Arabs constituted a nation and ought therefore to be united into a single state. For them the roots of fundamental criteria for nationhood were a shared language and a common history. On the other, Rashid Rida (d. 1935), the main disciple of Muhammad ‘Abduh, who was considered an authoritative voice of the Salafiyya movement with important international support (for example, from the Indian Khilafah Movement) and Abul Kalam Azad (d. 1958) developed a new panIslamist approach reforming the thinking of Jamal al-Din alAfghani (d. 1897) with the aim of at least religiously spurring the Islamic community towards the foundation of a new form of state rooted on religion. This political and ideological divergence was further complicated during the following decades, as a consequence of the controversial fulfillment of the struggle against European colonial control. With the end of WWII, an independence and selfdetermination process took root in a number of different territories: in Syria as in Lebanon and Transjordan (1946), in IndiaPakistan (1947) as in Iran (1946), in Tunisia as in Morocco (1956), and finally also in Algeria (1962). Palestine represents an exception. In this context, the state of Israel soon became the symbol of a country funded with Western support to maintain a post-colonial enclave in the area. The Suez Canal conflict of 1956, with the intervention of France and Great Britain, clearly amplified this viewpoint. During this historical phase – notwithstanding Mohammad Mosaddegh’s political experience in Iran from 1951– 1953 – Egypt’s leading role was clearly imposed with the rise of Nasserism, arousing a sense of excitement and hope for a new future. This should have been assured by the fulfillment of a national transformative process rooted in socialism and an assertive form of political self-determination, now possible thanks to the end of the previous monarchic system in Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia and Libya. Dynasties survived only in Jordan and Morocco. More in detail, the pledge of real independence for the majority of the Arab countries, already promised during WWII, was achieved through a hidden agreement of purpose among the Islamic movements, the nationalist secularized intelligentsia and the military. Nevertheless, the latter played a prominent role in the following decades, strongly affecting the nature and the functioning

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of the Arab states’ regimes and their balances of power. In fact, a multiparty system supported by popular elections endured only for a few years. The risk of disorder and anarchy stimulated singleparty governments, usually strengthened with military support and a strong man at the helm: Nasser in Egypt, Bourguiba in Tunisia, the FLN in Algeria, Colonel Gaddafi in Libya, ‘Asad in Syria, Mohammad Reza Palhavi in Iran, the monarchies in Morocco and Jordan. Indeed, the new national identity was built employing a form of aggressive propaganda rooted in top-down social and socialist reforms, all imbued with persuasive secularist ideals, belligerent anti-Zionist warmongering and a clear pro-Palestinian attitude. 21 The awakening, as usual, was tragic and the military defeat impressive. In 1967, the Israeli Army in six days annihilated the air forces of Egypt and Syria and conquered the West Bank and Jerusalem, the Golan Heights and the entire Sinai Peninsula. The myth of Arab unity, already enfeebled after the demise of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1961, did not survive. The nationalist and secularist approach had given the illusion of being militarily prepared; instead, the defeat was symptomatic of the failure of its entire strategy and set of beliefs. One of the main reasons for this failure was the speed and total lack of balance of the imposed transition and transformation from the colonial system to the new regimes. Moreover, the optimism of pan-Arab ideology also collided with objective economic difficulties, partially inherited from the colonialist decades. In particular, although some of the economic reforms gave partial results, the concept of Arab unity never took root also because of intra-Arab political fragmentation. Pan-Arabism did not concretely materialize and, finally, Arab countries preferred to defend the borders imposed by the European powers, rapidly forgetting all the ideological assumptions concerning Greater Syria, the Fertile Crescent and pan-Arabism. At the same time, in Turkey and Iran, military and regime forces were playing a prominent role in antithesis with a William L. Cleveland, A History of the Modern Middle East, p. 273; Eugene Rogan, The Arabs, (New York, 2009), p. 277; Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, (New York, 2013). 21

INTRODUCTION

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varied opposition populated by communists (Tudeh and PKK) and Islamic religious parties. Both countries equally experienced the failure of top-down secularist political platforms and their societies were strained by internal inequalities and divisions. After the 1970s, Anwar Sadat’s attacks on Nasserism gave shape to a sort of religious revanchism that involved the entire Middle East, to which corresponded a parallel increase in the revenues of the petro-dollar Gulf countries and the more procapitalist economic attitudes of some key Arab states. At the same time, the success of the Iranian revolution and the foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran under the ideal of the vilayet-e faqih represented a dramatic change in the relations between secularist and religious political forces, exerting a strong impact on the Islamic world after years of pan-Arabist ideological predominance. Therefore, it was during this decade that religion is traditionally considered to have returned to the public domain as a factor with which to politically identify. From this standpoint, the Lebanese civil war, the Iranian revolution and the global Jihad against the Soviet Union during the 1980s in Afghanistan amplified religion as a force mobilizing to battle and to distinguish from political rivals, both on the domestic and international levels. 22 Although expressing and asserting transnational territorial ambitions rooted in universal religious ideals, post-1970s Islamist movements sought to create an Islamic order within the existing nation-states or according to the form of modern nation-states. Similar to secular nationalism, they based their discourses on a mystic conception of the nation (understood according to the Islamic religious perspective) as the sovereign ‘body’, homogeneous and undivided. And so, the so-called revival of the ‘religious’ in politics did not solely represent the return of forms of manipulation of popular religious sentiments by specific political elites or groups. It publicly announced the ceaseless interweaving of religious forms of identification with highly complex power Gilles Kepel, Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam, (London, 2002); Oliver Roy, Globalized Islam: the search of a new Ummah, (New York, 2006); Richard C. Martin, Abbas Barzegar, Islamism. Contested perspectives on Political Islam, (Stanford, 2010). 22

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relationships, 23 defining new boundaries of inclusion and exclusion that permeated socio-economic and political arenas determining a new understanding of collective representation according to the ideal of the modern nation-state. Therefore, this broad historical spectrum well represents the complexity of the relationship between religion, politics and nationalism. The importance of an inter-disciplinary and geographical approach has emerged as necessary to better clarify important specificities characterizing the Arab world, the Indian subcontinent and the Turkish and Iranian landscapes. The first four contributions from Drs. Henley, Demichelis, Preuschaft and Maestri, are different case studies of the most important geographical areas of the Arab world, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and from Lebanon to Syria. The Arab section, moreover, has two sub-parts. In the first, the Arab-Christian communities in Palestine and Egypt are explored by Dr. Maggiolini and Dr. Melcangi, analysing forms of ‘religious nationalism’ that developed during the second half of the 20th century. In the second, Prof. Ilan Pappe sheds light on a specific, unknown historical event of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Dr. Zvi-Morad breaks the boundaries of a study more directly concerned with politicalreligious aspects by focusing on Israeli-Palestinian cinema. A Middle Eastern section was necessary to better identify in what way the Turkish and Iranian world has approached the concept of ‘religious nationalism’ in the last decades. The contributions of Drs. Sen, Shayan and Saleh highlight specific aspects that these contexts share with the Arab world, beyond traditionally imposed cultural and sectarian divisions. Lastly, the Indian subcontinent section, with a specific focus on Pakistan and Bangladesh, enables the entire study to cover the analysis of religious-nationalism embracing the far eastern part of the so-called Islamic World. Dr. Saleem’s and Dr. Kabir’s contributions are important for showing similarities and differences with the previous sections, further reconsidering the fault lines on Atalia Omer, Jason A. Springs, Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook, (Santa Barbara, 2013), p. 8. 23

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which Islamic societies and states have been developed, especially regarding their inclusive and exclusive attributes. The final section aims to embrace an issue generally excluded by analysis and research on nationalism: jihadist movements. Indeed, it analyses the development of jihadism in recent decades, focusing on what appears to be a synchronic move within and from the global-(g)local dimension, which seems to blur the traditional divisions between the international and national dimensions, especially in relation to the contemporary statebuilding claims of some of these movements. Prof. Redaelli and Dr. Plebani’s works highlight key issues that characterized the historical evolution of the jihadist galaxy. In fact, its current internal ideological and strategic debate has much to say about the controversial intertwining between politics and religion and it is a valid means to reconsider our understanding of the relationship between state and nation in contemporary times. The conclusions are provided by Profs. Branca and Choueiri. Prof. Branca proposes an overview of the concept of ‘religious nationalism’ reconsidering the development of the relationship between politics and religion from the Nahda to nowadays. As he points outs, religious nationalism could describe the identity process through which, as a sort of ‘Gallicanism’, every Islamic country and each religious minority could improve an internally shared understanding of its spiritual and political awareness and self-perception. Prof. Choueiri focuses on the emergence of democracy as a dominant discourse and political programme in the Arab world. This dynamic signals the relegation of purely nationalist or religious fields of operation to a new cycle of soulsearching and self-criticism. Accordingly, nationalism is gradually being reinvented to search for its lost alter ego or democratic values and practices, while religion will survive its hour of trial by performing a creative act of reconciling itself to the same global configuration of human rights and equality.

1. RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM IN THE OFFICIAL CULTURE OF MULTI-CONFESSIONAL LEBANON ALEXANDER D. M. HENLEY 1 INTRODUCTION: SECTARIANISM AND RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM IN LEBANON

A Lebanese prime minister once complained to his president, “When will we have the best soldier as chief of the army, the best diplomat as the minister of foreign affairs, and so on, regardless of their religion, Christian or Muslim?” The president replied, “What about loyalty? For me, loyalty comes before who can be the best.” This anecdote was related by a political adviser long after the event, but regardless of historical accuracy it illustrates the commonplace assumption of an essential tension between religious and national loyalties in Lebanon. It is an assumption that has been held by countless politicians, commentators and academics since the early days of the Lebanese state, which was built around the management of religious difference. The presumed incompatibility of religious and national loyalties has in turn informed all sorts of political projects: exclusion of Muslims from power for fear of their trans-national loyalty to an Islamic or Arab umma; distrust of Christians in power for fear of their sub-national exclusivism; partition of Lebanon into confessional nation-states or federal units for fear of sectarian conflict; exclusive rule by a secular elite for fear of the irrationally religious masses; and secularization of the state in Dr Alex Henley is a Lecturer in Islam and the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford’s Faculty of Theology and Religion. 1

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order to de-confessionalise those masses or to exclude divisive or oppressive religious leaders from power. There has, in short, been a prevailing presumption that religion and nationalism must be irreconcilable in a multiconfessional state. According to one recent book on Lebanese politics: “The concept of national citizenship has not taken hold in Lebanon in the same way that it has in Western nations. Loyalty to the family, the clan, and the religious community overrides other allegiances, leaving little room for national patriotism.” 2 Some nuance has been injected into this picture by scholarship on cases of sectarian nationalism, where national identities are not rejected but given a factional religious or sectarian twist to produce what Fanar Haddad, writing on Iraq, calls “antagonistic visions of unity.” 3 Sune Haugbolle observes a similar phenomenon in Lebanon, commenting that in the language and imagery of party propaganda, “religious/sectarian and secular/nationalist imagery come together in attempts to define the nation from a sectarian perspective.” 4 Lebanese Christian nationalisms have been the classic examples of this kind of antagonistic sectarian nationalism, 5 but Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr has more recently argued that Muslim communities have for decades been forming counternationalisms rooted in their own religious imagery. 6 Despite these less oppositional treatments of religion and nationalism, there Rola El-Husseini, Pax Syriana: Elite politics in postwar Lebanon, (Syracuse, NY, 2012), p. 140. 3 Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity, (London, 2011). 4 Sune Haugbolle, ‘Spatial Representation of Sectarian National Identity in Residential Beirut’, in Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India, Eds. Alev Cinar, Srirupa Roy, Maha Yahya, (Ann Arbor, 2012), pp. 308–334. 5 Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism, (London, 1995); Ghassan Hage, ‘Religious Fundamentalism as a Political Strategy: The evolution of the Lebanese Forces’ religious discourse during the Lebanese Civil War’, Critique of Anthropology, 12/1 (1992), pp. 27–45. 6 Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shi’ite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities, (New York, 2008). 2

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remains an overall consensus that public expressions of religious identity in a multi-confessional environment will detract from the socially unifying benefits of national belonging in the modern state. Whereas the term ‘religious nationalism’ in multi-confessional societies therefore tends to be used as virtually synonymous with sectarianism, this chapter will apply it to a cross-confessional nationalist discourse that emerged in Lebanon in the mid-twentieth century, and that has come into focus since the 1975–90 civil war as a direct response to sectarian discourses propagated by various parties and militias. This cross-confessional religious nationalism makes pluralism itself the basis for a common Lebanese identity, espousing ecumenical theologies and locating the authentic roots of modern concepts of civility in parallel Islamic and Christian traditions. The most prominent producers of this discourse have been the officially-recognized heads of Lebanon’s various religious communities, especially the Sunni Muslim grand mufti and the Maronite Christian patriarch, whose discourse will be the focus of this chapter. Indeed, I would suggest that it is precisely because it comes from the mouths of these controversial figures that the striking phenomenon of a pluralist religious nationalism in Lebanon has largely been ignored by scholars of both religion and nationalism. ‘Religious leaders’ have been pigeonholed into the cosmology of sectarian religion versus secular nationalism, with scant attention to what they actually say or do, or to the differences among this almost incoherently broad class. From a recent book on challenges to the nation-state, for instance, we learn that “Lebanon’s political structure revolves around the antagonistic and incongruous axis of religious authority versus state authority.” 7 This chapter draws on public statements made by certain Lebanese religious authorities in order to elucidate a common discourse of religious nationalism that is characterized precisely by its affirmation of and connection to state authority. The public statements and sermons of the mufti and patriarch during Lebanon’s 1975–90 civil war offer a clear alternative to the Maurus Reinkowski, Sofia Saadeh, ‘A nation divided: Lebanese confessionalism’, in Citizenship Citizenship and Ethnic Conflict: Challenging the nation-state, Ed. Haldun Gulalp, (London, 2006), pp. 99–116. 7

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sectarian ideologies that held sway in each community’s wartime enclave, peddled by militias and by Muslim or Christian clerics loyal to those militias. This is what makes the civil war period particularly interesting for a study of religious nationalism as well as sectarianism: issues of communal identity and belonging were cast in high relief, with an urgency and duration not seen before or since. The religious nationalist discourse described in this chapter was not an entirely new phenomenon in the 1970s, but it was elaborated in more sophisticated forms as a vision for national ‘salvation’ from the crisis. It has become a permanent feature of what could be called the official orthodoxy of the Lebanese public sphere.

WHAT IS RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM IN A MULTICONFESSIONAL NATION? Nation It is no exaggeration to say that the central concerns in the preaching of both mufti and patriarch on every major festival during the civil war period were nation (watan) and state (dawla). 8 These concerns are expressed through prayers or direct exhortations to action, which are authenticated and given moral weight by reference to Islamic or Christian values and sources. These divergent frames of reference, however, do not impede them

The documents cited in this chapter were public messages delivered orally as sermons and distributed as texts. As well as being broadcast on television and radio, they were printed in the Lebanese press, and many can be found reproduced in the invaluable documents section of the quarterly review published by CEDRE (ed.), Haliyyat / Panorama de l’Actualité / Panorama of Events 50 vols. (Beirut, La Maison du Futur). These documents will here be cited by the year (CE) and the occasion in the Islamic or Christian calendar for which they were produced. Full texts are available from the author. 8

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from being consistently and explicitly linked to an ideal of unity (wihda) for the Lebanese nation “in the shadow of the state.” 9 The nation is defined by Patriarch Antoine Khoreich as “a people whose children are closely united and who, of one heart, live the same zest of patriotism and lend together their wills to save their country, to save their heritage, stay faithful to their history and to their civilization.” 10 These three core components – unity, commitment and heritage – are classic features of modern nationalist thought. Unity in the Lebanese context, and more urgently during the war, refers characteristically to unity among members of different confessional groups. “When will the sons of the one society,” asks Khoreich, “recognize different religions and sects as equal in rights and duties, that they are born free without exception, and that they are together responsible before God and their conscience and their society […]?” 11 The question of unity raises the same specter of sectarian disunity for Mufti Hassan Khaled: In the homeland [watan], on the smallness of its area, spacious enough for all its people on a basis of justice and preservation of freedoms, any one of its groups cannot build Lebanon in its image, whether partisan or sectarian or ethnic; and whatever this or that group goes too far in, like these current attempts, it will return in the end to the logic of the wise citizen [muwaṭin], aware of his national responsibility [masʾuliyyatihi al-wataniyya], because Lebanon cannot be other than an image of wonderful homogeneity among all its communities […] 12

Shared commitment to Lebanon should override any other communal ties when it comes to the public space of the nationstate. Both mufti and patriarch, in the passages quoted, also express this connection to the nation in terms of commitment’s flip-side, This is an expression used with variations by both mufti and patriarch, e.g. Lent 1976; Adha 1986; “in the shadow of public laws”, Christmas 1977; “in the shadow of legitimate authority”, Fitr 1983. 10 Christmas 1981. 11 Christmas 1984. 12 Fitr 1984. 9

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responsibility. This adds an objective quality to the relationship with the nation. By implication Lebanon is not only a lofty ideal to which the preachers recommend the individual opt in; it is a social reality that demands a given response. To the nation one owes sacrifices of “loyalty, time, resources and even blood.” 13 Khoreich rolls all these ideas neatly into his assertion that “the nation is one family,” 14 which plays on cultural associations of the family with ultimate responsibility and, ironically, with the sect as “spiritual family,” a common way of referring to Lebanon’s communities. Undergirding unity and commitment in most nationalist thought is a sense of shared heritage. Culturalist narratives of Lebanese sectarianism have supposed the absence of a shared heritage to be the young nation’s greatest obstacle, or even pointed to Lebanon as a tectonic fault-line in the supposed clash of civilizations. Yet when the Mufti of the Lebanese Republic talks about “our heritage” and “our civilization,” it is not in the context of Sunnism or Islam but in terms of the Lebanese nation. 15 The Lebanese heritage that he recalls is a history of coexistence: Lebanon was, in the eyes of the world, Eastern and Western, the country of radiance and civilization and learning and beauty […] rest and relaxation. And the life of its people was a model of constructive brotherly cooperation and coexistence. 16

Patriarch Khoreich similarly emphasizes a successful history of cooperation: In the history of Lebanon […] the Lebanese, when they speak in unison, can overcome all crises, and rid themselves of all occupations, and so bring peace in their lands. 17

In a more specific example, Khoreich responds to the ravages of the 1982 ‘War of the Mountain’ in the mixed Chouf region by pointing out not just the material destruction being wrought by Christmas 1981. Christmas 1984. 15 E.g. Ramadan 1979. 16 Ramadan 1975. 17 Christmas 1983. 13 14

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Maronites and Druzes on each other’s property, but the eradication of a joint cultural heritage dating back to the seventeenth century golden era of Emir Fakhreddine. 18 The implication in these sermons is that modern Lebanon is the product of cooperation between its indigenous confessional communities going back centuries; a reading of history by no means universally accepted. Mufti and patriarch thus stand together in opposing perceptions of Lebanon as either a later colonial imposition or a minority Phoenicio-Maronite creation. The patriarchs, unlike Muslim leaders, are able to appeal to Maronite pietistic traditions rooted specifically in the land of Lebanon, and they do not shy away from such non-inclusive references. Khoreich, for instance, incorporates references to the shrines of the Maronite saints of Mount Lebanon into an almost creedal formula alongside faith in a Trinitarian God and in Lebanese heritage: We believe in God […] and we believe in His Divine Redeeming Son […] and we believe in His Holy Spirit […] and we believe in Lebanon whose soil has been intermixed with the remains of the saints […] and we believe in the authenticity of the Lebanese and their history and heritage and civilization and humanitarian values. 19

Yet these Christian and Maronite themes are used to cement an attachment to a nation in which a man’s closest tie is to “the son of his nation” – whether Christian or Muslim – who is “his partner in joy and sorrow and the loneliness of destiny [masīr].” 20 Muslim leaders do not have a comparable Lebanese religious geography to draw on, but this has not prevented some, like Mufti Khaled, from treating the Lebanese nation as an objective reality. Thus, speaking of “the unity of the land, the unity of the people, and their destiny [masīr] together,” 21 Khaled echoes the patriarch’s usage of the word masīr, imbuing national solidarity and territorial sovereignty with a Christmas 1982. Easter 1984. 20 Christmas 1984. 21 Fitr 1984. 18 19

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sense of predestination or divine ordination. This is a principle concisely encapsulated in the idea of Lebanon as “final homeland [watan nihaʾī]” for its people. It is a testament to the mufti’s influence on official nationalist discourse that this phrase, popularized by Khaled’s Islamic Principles on the Lebanese predicament in 1983, 22 appears in the first article of the 1989 Document of National Reconciliation on which the post-war ‘Second Republic’ was founded. State The mufti and patriarch share a vision of Lebanese nationhood whose basis is a history of religious pluralism and a vocation to coexistence. This nation, moreover, is nothing without a state to represent and protect its values of equality and freedom. Mufti Khaled expresses the relationship between citizen (muwatin) and state as a kind of symbiosis, whereby the greatness of the Lebanese citizen is what makes Lebanon great, but conversely “the citizen is only great if legitimate authority extends its shadow over the whole of the nation’s soil and the whole of its people.” 23 The ideal stated time and again by both leaders, here in the words of Khoreich, is therefore “a single strong state [dawla], imposing its prestige and authority on everyone without exception […] equal in the shadow of social justice and responsible freedom and dignity without injustice or fear.” 24 The role of the state on which the sermons focus is enforcement of the rule of law, serving “to guarantee for us life in an atmosphere of security and contentment and dignity.” 25 The patriarch and mufti agree, throughout the war, that any way forward must be found through the constitutional mechanisms of the state. The triple presidencies – of the Republic, of the Council of Ministers, and of the Chamber of Deputies – are “Al-Thawabit al-Islamiyya”, 21/9/1983, full text reproduced in Haliyyat, vol. 31 (documents section), and in al-Liwaʾ newspaper, 22/9/1983. 23 Fitr 1983. 24 Easter 1984. 25 Christmas 1977. 22

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imbued with a particular significance, both as executive offices essential to the operation of the state, and as symbolically representative of national continuity. As Khaled says, “these symbols of Lebanese authority remain the only way by which the march of concord between the Lebanese can pass.” 26 This is a particularly bold statement from the mufti, given that the three presidencies were (until 1989) set in a confessional hierarchy of powers that favored the Maronite head of state over the less influential Muslim offices of prime minister and speaker. Khaled lobbied for reform of the confessional system of government, but such was his regard for the state as the institutional expression of the nation that he would only envisage reform from within. So, for example, although the Presidency of the Republic (as it then was) embodied Maronite hegemony, in 1988 he preached the importance of “holding the coming presidential elections in a calm atmosphere supported by cooperation and accompanied by a great sense of national responsibility.” 27 A similar point could be made about Khaled’s desire to see the Army perform its “historic role,” 28 from which heights it had fallen into “practices that put it on the level of the militias.” 29 Nor is this merely the rhetoric by which he criticizes a military he sees as a means of Maronite domination. Whereas the Muslim militias tended to regard the Army as part of the problem and therefore in practice a military adversary, Khaled accords it “a full share in restoring secure living and peace to the nation.” 30 The mufti actively preferred Muslim West Beirut to be controlled by a flawed organ of the state than by Muslim militias. 31

Fitr 1981. Ramadan 1988. 28 Adha 1987. 29 Fitr 1985. 30 Adha 1987. 31 Khaled negotiated security agreements to this effect in the 1980s. See e.g. Haliyyat, 24/9/1983; 25/3/1984. 26 27

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HOW DOES A LEBANESE RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM

RECONCILE RELIGIOUS AND SECULAR LOYALTIES?

Salvation by faith alone The preaching of Lebanon’s official religious leaders boils down to a central message of salvation by faith alone: faith in “the sanctity of the formula” of coexistence; and faith in Lebanese citizenship as a vocation, a “great message” for the world. 32 Perhaps it is no wonder that scholarship has paid scant attention to this discourse, since faith is not, by and large, the stuff of secular political science. It is excluded from the conventional narratives of power and politics, even though this ‘religious’ discourse has a prime place in public commentary on national affairs, being delivered on major national holidays at ceremonies attended by the full cadre of state officials and broadcast on television and radio. When the mufti and patriarch address the nation, they do not differentiate between salvation (khalas or inqadh) of a religious nature or a political nature. For instance, in an ‘Eid al-Fitr sermon given to a massive audience at Beirut’s municipal stadium, Khaled speaks of the patience learned through the Ramadan fast: Patience is one of the forms of jihad, and jihad is an act of worship; and the respect of life is an act of worship […] Lebanon today needs acts of worship like these, leading to salvation, all its people doing them equally. 33

This salvation achieved through worshipful acts (ʿibadat) defies any separation between ‘other-world’ and ‘real-world’ motivations or goals. Similarly, one ‘Eid al-Adha, the feast of sacrifice, Khaled explains the significance of the occasion thus: The day of Abraham and Ismael – in which is manifested the meaning of sacrifice supported by faith and surrender to God – is your day. It is a day of seriousness and determination and

32 33

Fitr 1975. Fitr 1983.

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resolve upon going into a constructive phase, a phase of spreading security and peace. 34

Meanwhile the patriarch turns the theme of self-sacrifice as a means to salvation during Lent and Easter, into a patriotic imperative, with direct implications for the crucial wartime issue of state reform. Khoreich rebukes the intransigence of Lebanese Christians who defend their privileged place in the confessional system as a necessary guarantee of communal security. He advocates, to the contrary, that the state must be rebuilt on the foundation of “a generous cooperation between the spiritual families of Lebanon in a spirit of reciprocal sacrifice for the good of all.” 35 One such sermon concludes with a prayer addressed as follows: to the Divine Redeemer who forgives our sins and is gracious to us and gives us wisdom and prudence and inspires us in the best ways to save our country and ourselves and our children, and restores hope and stability and tranquility and peace to our nation, Lebanon. 36

Neither mufti nor patriarch, therefore, disconnect personal ‘inner’ or ‘religious’ dispositions – faith, surrender to God, wisdom, prudence, patience – from a public order defined by ‘social’ or ‘political’ concerns such as security and stability. In the midst of sectarian bloodshed, the mufti and patriarch argue faith to be the only sure route to national salvation. The citizen-believer If faith still sounds a rather lofty or even naïve ideal on which to pin a nationalist project in a country apparently divided by faith itself, the mufti and patriarch ground this in practical discussion of the role of the individual believer in realizing the national ideal. In so doing, they advocate a model of citizenship in which national belonging and the religious identities of Lebanon’s various sects are Adha 1981. Lent 1976. 36 Easter 1984. 34 35

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not only compatible, they are indissoluble. The two converge especially in the teaching of moral values, which in both leaders’ preaching is at the heart of being both a good citizen and a good believer. These leaders are of course unequivocal in their support for the rule of law and the state’s monopoly on violence, but their notion of citizenship as responsibility to the nation does not stop at compliance with law enforcement. Whether based on ‘secular’ or ‘religious’ principles, the modern ideal of a harmonious national community requires citizens to hold themselves to a higher standard – a standard conforming to commonly-held values. “There are many cases of what is forbidden by law and goes unpunished, but the deterrent there is conscience, honor and chivalry. How can we correct all these defects without the right religious, moral and national education?” 37 Religion is thus identified not as a source of conflict but as the common source for an authentically Lebanese national value-system. One implication is that confessional schools are the proper context in which to nurture, through the same process of moral education, both good believers and good citizens. This conclusion is particularly pertinent because the predominance of confessional schooling in Lebanon is commonly cited as a structural cause of sectarian division in society. While there may be truth to that claim, it is not to be found in simplistic contrasts between religious education and (secular) national education – especially given that the same official religious leaders who are chief authors of religious nationalism also supervise many of those schools. The essential likeness of Lebanese values and identity is encapsulated by the theme of a fraternity of citizen-believers. “O brothers!” is the most common form in which both mufti and patriarch address their audience, expressing the kinship of believers within a “spiritual family.” There has been a tendency in some studies of ‘political Islam’ to view such language as antithetical to modern (secular) citizenship. Fuad Khuri puts this strongly, explaining that the “contradiction between ‘brethren’ and ‘citizens’

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Lent 1977.

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is one of the most obvious examples” of the modern state’s “essential contradiction with Islamic religious traditions”: 38 The logic of ‘brethren’ implies that equality of interaction, both in theory and in practice, is contained within the same religious community. This belief necessarily stands in opposition to the concept of ‘citizens’, where equality, at least in theory, is thought to be a generalized phenomenon within the state boundaries. State laws apply universally to all citizens; religious laws are by definition particular, applicable only to brethren. 39

Bryan Turner, writing more recently on Islamic discourse in Egypt, makes the same point that “the word brotherhood itself indicates the presence, in Weber’s terms, of closed/communal ties within the open/associational world of state arrangements.” 40 The conflict between these alternatives is manifested, Khuri suggests, in “opposition to state structures, demanding the enforcement of Islamic laws under such mottoes as: ‘the Qur’an is our constitution’, ‘the re-establishment of the caliphate’ or ‘the return to the roots’ (asala).” 41 By contrast, “the protagonists of the state” respond to such ‘religious’ language by emphasizing “a new political language: ‘national unity’, ‘public interest’, ‘the country’s sovereignty’, ‘the maintenance of independence’, ‘civil and political rights’ or ‘progress and development’.” 42 Bernard Lewis clarifies that this new language is truly understood and accepted only by “small, mostly Westernized elites,” whereas “traditional beliefs and aspirations still predominate” in the Muslim masses, who can never

Fuad I. Khuri, Imams and Emirs: State, Religion and Sects in Islam (London, 1990), p. 219. 39 Ibid., p. 220. 40 Bryan S. Turner, ‘Islam, Civil Society, and Citizenship: Reflections on the Sociology of Citizenship and Islamic Studies’, in Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, Eds. Nils A. Butenschon, Uri Davis, Manuel Hassassian, (Syracuse, 2000), pp. 28–48. 41 Fuad I. Khuri, Imams, p. 224. 42 Ibid. 38

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“entirely lose” their ingrained system of meanings. 43 There is an undercurrent of warning in Lewis’ work on The Political Language of Islam, as he diagnoses the Muslim psyche as having only superficially adopted a modern political vocabulary. Words like ‘brethren’, therefore, reveal to Lewis the “older and deeper loyalties” of the Islamic umma, which a discerning analyst may see “stirring beneath the cracking surface of the modern nationstates.” 44 Lebanon’s religious leaders offer a prime case against this kind of dichotomization between traditional and modern, or indigenous and Western, language and concepts. In no conventional sense could these clerics be called Westernized elites, but both mufti and patriarch perfectly fit Khuri’s description of “protagonists of the state.” They use a thoroughly modern vocabulary to discuss citizenship and the nation-state: every one of the new slogans listed by Khuri features prominently and repeatedly in their discourse. 45 Nor is this a superficial usage of a modish jargon, behind which one must delve as Lewis does to discover the real meanings of what he considers essentially “religious language.” Rather, these concepts are invoked as tools for change, being translated in every sermon into a call to action with specific intended consequences for society. This chapter has already outlined the clerics’ statist program, which translates the principle of sovereignty into unequivocal support for the Lebanese Army and Internal Security Forces, demanding that security and law enforcement be put 42.

43

Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, (Chicago, 1988), p.

Ibid. Common expressions in their sermons include: “Lebanon the sovereign, the free, the independent”; “national unity” and “public interest” as opposed to “sectarianism” or “partisan interests”; and “human rights” or “citizen’s rights”. Development is mentioned less frequently, which is perhaps unsurprising given the more basic preoccupations of the war period. In several instances, the word tanmiya is used in connection with reconstruction, especially state-building and economic development. E.g. “Security is the key to all good, and the gateway to all development and prosperity,” Adha 1987. 44 45

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unconditionally in their hands. By the same logic, the clerical elite opposed any de facto devolution of local government, tax collection, or other functions of the state to the control of sub-state actors. This chapter has also sketched the sophisticated conception of national citizenship that underlies the slogans of “national unity,” “public interest,” and “civil and political rights” with which the official religious leaders pepper their speech. The implications of these ideas are real and challenging, a challenge they make quite explicit. Khoreich calls for “an urgent uprising to correct the course of destiny and undermine the mini-states and unite to build a single strong state.” 46 In Khaled’s words, “Zero hour has tolled, and all the Lebanese must rise up as one man against division and strife.” 47 These were not empty words but incitement to pursue a specific “political solution to save our nation.” 48 In the context of the civil war, the mufti and patriarch sought to incite a kind of citizens’ revolution against the militias’ sectarian logic of communal self-defense. The mufti and patriarch are undoubtedly “protagonists of the state,” but they also address their audiences as “brothers,” “brother believers,” “Muslims,” or “Maronites.” In this act of hailing a community they undeniably constitute those “closed/communal ties” that Turner so vilifies. Of course, their very identification as heads of Lebanese communities is part of the systemic ideology that constitutes sects as political subjects in Lebanon. Nor indeed do these leaders shy away from this implicit function of community-making; they make it explicit for instance through their sponsorship of religious education mentioned above, which is one element of their appeal for communal solidarity through “the return to the roots.” Yet this “return to the roots” is not the “opposition to state structures” that Khuri assumes it must be. When Khaled speaks of Ramadan as an opportunity to return “to our Islamic roots [asala],” he explains that these are the same roots: Easter 1984 Adha 1981. 48 Ibid. 46 47

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ALEXANDER D. M. HENLEY which taught us openness to all piety, and participation in all goodness and righteousness and betterment, and in every endeavor toward moderation, mediation, cooperation and understanding, in order to build with our hands the nation of peace and harmony. 49

There is no sense here of serving two masters; the virtues that Muslims learn from their Islamic roots are the virtues of citizenship. Indeed, later in the same document Khaled emphasizes this congruence by using the same key words he used of Islam to describe Lebanon as “a nation of understanding and fruitful cooperation, and a nation of betterment and giving and good offices.” This whole text by the mufti on Ramadan is addressed “O Muslims and brother citizens!” – explicitly eliding these identities and inviting Lebanese Muslims to do the same. Throughout Khaled’s discourse he uses these three words – “Muslims,” “brothers,” “citizens” – interchangeably or in combinations. It would be fair to say that he generally uses a hailing of ‘citizens’ to introduce some reference to the Lebanese nation-state or its government. This is not to say much, however, as such references are scattered liberally throughout his sermons, as are exhortations to behave in a manner befitting a Lebanese citizen. Nor would it be meaningful to imagine the mufti’s hail of ‘citizens’ as invoking a secularized mode of identification, as Turner might expect. Khaled interweaves Qur’anic and other exclusively Islamic imagery throughout his discourse. For instance, in one sermon “O citizens” introduces a description of the nation built around the narrative of the feast: “On ‘Eid al-Adḥa, we can hardly see anything but Lebanon as the sacrificial victim.” 50 In another, it is interjected in a discussion of legitimacy in relations between the people and those who govern, but introduces a series of quotation from the Qur’an on divine creation: O citizens,

49 50

Ramadan 1986. Adha 1983.

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This is the tradition [sunna] of life built on an appointed order and not lasting except in an appointed order, and this is the tradition of God in the universe, which does not change nor transform. The Most High says: … 51

Mufti Khaled’s view of national citizenship is neither Turner’s “secularized version of the more primordial bonds of tradition, religion and locality,” 52 nor is it merely a new way of dressing up “older and deeper” ways of identifying, as Lewis suspects. The mufti and patriarch fully integrate the values and goals of the national community and the religious community. The “return to the roots” is not proposed as an alternative to embracing modern association with the nation-state, but is a cultural resource for the ethical codes that can underpin a Lebanese understanding of responsible citizenship. So, what of Khuri’s dictum that “State laws apply universally to all citizens; religious laws are by definition particular, applicable only to brethren”? 53 The official religious leaders certainly agree that state laws apply universally to all citizens, or ought to; rule of law and equality of citizenship were key principles upon which they stood in the face of wartime opposition. There is a difference, however, in the way they discuss what Khuri ironically equates as “state laws” and “religious laws.” As mentioned above, they have a more sophisticated conception of citizenship for which state law is necessary but not sufficient. Law is only a dim reflection of the nation’s values, and it is those values by which a good citizen abides in order to live harmoniously in a national society, not merely those laws which are written and enforced by the state. It is the religious community that these clerics propose as the source of the Lebanese nation’s values. Are the values of each sect “by definition particular, applicable only to brethren”? ‘Religion’, as imagined by Lebanon’s official religious leaders, is essentially a force for good in the world, and Fitr 1984. Bryan S. Turner, ‘Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship’, in Citizenship and Social Theory, Ed. Bryan S. Turner, (London, 1993), pp. 1–18. 53 Fuad I. Khuri, Imams, p. 220. 51 52

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that benevolent religious essence is in the authentic roots of all Lebanese citizens: We cannot lose trust in the roots [asala] of the Lebanese and his devoted patriotism [wataniyya], which must make him return to himself and his conscience and his Lord […] working for the predominance of good over evil […] 54

Khoreich elsewhere asks, “would all these evils [perpetrated during the war] have happened if religion was firmer in hearts, morals more stable in souls, and patriotism more fixed in minds?’ 55 There is certainly here a notion of universal religion being the common heritage of all Lebanese and the source of their values. The clerics also express this more specifically in terms of the proximity of the Islamic and Christian traditions. Khaled elaborates on this point: We [Muslims] participate with our Christian citizens in one nation, and both we and they are people of the book, representing a civilization with convergent religious and historical roots, seeking a single common goal, which is Lebanon’s sovereignty, and the unity of its land and its people. And we repeat today, in the shadow of these fateful conditions, their call to a common word between us and them: that we worship only God, and we do not associate anything with Him, and some of us do not take others as masters aside from God, and we will rebuild the nation on goodness and truth and justice and equality among all its citizens. 56

Khaled expresses what might be called an ecumenical belief that the two religions share the basics of a theology and a morality. This view is justified here with reference to the Qur’anic phrase ‘people of the book’, which emphasizes common traditions of revelation between Jews, Christians and Muslims, but there are also notes in the discourse of a more universalistic ecumenism: Easter 1985. Lent 1977. 56 Ramadan 1982. 54 55

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It is true that fasting in this noble month is the worship of the Muslims […] but it cannot be ignored that fasting is an ancient human worship practiced by nations in different eras […] and thus was one of the most important forms of worship and spiritual exercises of Jews and Christians and others […] 57

Part of the modern articulation of the secular (including politics, the state, etc.) has been the development of a sociology of religion, which sought to describe religion in very much the terms used by Khaled as a universal human phenomenon, comparable instances of which may be found in different cultures in all times and places. Using this distinctly modern understanding of ‘religion’, Khaled is thus able to speak of the Ramadan fast as a valuable resource for moral improvement among Muslims, while downplaying the exclusivity of Islamic spirituality and morality. The mufti and patriarch exhibit a belief in their “two great religions” 58 as manifestations of universal religion, which allows them to think of the Lebanese nation in its entirety as a community of citizen-believers. This does not mean, however, that they take the further step of imagining or advocating anything like an American-style ‘civil religion’, which in Robert Bellah’s classic description is a public agglomeration of the (lowest) common denominators of a state’s religions, or more accurately all those things that its majority hold sacred. 59 The social function of civil religion is integrationist, serving to mitigate or altogether subsume sectarian difference. An assimilationist model of unity is not what the official heads of Lebanon’s sects have in mind, and they certainly do not try to produce a neutrally religious discourse intended to be equally accessible to all Lebanese. The different religion of citizens and the origins of their civilization do not affect this unity. The diversity in unity has

Ramadan 1975. Lent 1976. 59 See Robert N. Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America’, Daedalus, 96/1 (1967), pp. 1–21. 57 58

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Typically, Khoreich here does not downplay cultural difference, but points to the potential to mobilize diverse cultural resources toward the same goal – the “single common goal” to which Khaled refers in the passage quoted above, “which is Lebanon’s sovereignty, and the unity of its land and its people.” 61 Although divisive ideologies and violent practices of sectarianism are among the chief social ills against which the official religious leaders preach during the war, their solution is not to marginalize sectarian identity but on the contrary to re-center it on their own terms. Communal solidarity thus becomes a route to national solidarity. In Khaled’s words: “Our appeal for unity of the Muslims is nothing but an appeal for unity of all the Lebanese.” 62 In another sermon he takes this further to emphasize the point that intra-communal disputes are to no-one’s benefit: Therefore the unity of the Lebanese Christians has become an Islamic political responsibility and the unity of the Lebanese Muslims a Christian political responsibility, and the unity of Muslims and Christians in one nation has become a shared Lebanese responsibility. 63

Lebanon’s communities are seen as discrete but essentially compatible cultural sub-units of the nation, their destined “final homeland.” Each religion provides the cultural resources for its believers to become good citizens, but these societal sub-units must be functioning harmoniously and in a manner true to their religious values in order to cooperate effectively as a whole society.

Lent 1977. Ramadan 1982. 62 Fitr 1985. 63 Fitr 1983. 60 61

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WHERE DOES THIS DISCOURSE OF RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM COME FROM?

The comparison of sermons produced by a Muslim and a Christian in this study is crucial for the light it sheds on the crossconfessional nature of their religious nationalism. Since neither figure waters down the Islamic or Christian content of his preaching, their common goals are less apparent in isolation. And since both are primarily interested in addressing their own communities – not in any kind of inter-faith dialogue between religious leaders – the multi-confessional context that shapes their discourse could well be missed by separate treatments. What makes a comparison of these particular leaders especially interesting is their different relationships with the state, which defy a simple ‘inclusion-moderation’ explanation of their national ideologies as simply accommodating the sensibilities or propagandizing needs of masters in the regime. State muftis, being government employees in most Middle Eastern countries, are generally afforded little legitimacy as independent actors. This is especially true in authoritarian contexts where they may be expected to function as mouthpieces of the ruling party, “defining Islam for the state” as the title of Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen’s classic book puts it. 64 Even in single party regimes, however, there is reason to believe that the religious establishments often have more room for maneuver than they are given credit for. 65 A striking byproduct of modern regimes’ efforts to centralize religious affairs under state supervision has been the creation of new institutional power centers with formidable resources and a public platform. This was a process of bureaucratization evident in Lebanon through the course of the twentieth century just as in the majority of its regional neighbors. On top of the influence that may be negotiated by any wellcoordinated interest group even within an authoritarian framework, Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: muftis and fatwas of the Dar al-Ifta, (Leiden, 1997). 65 See e.g. Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution, (Cambridge, 2013). 64

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these religious establishments and the muftis placed at their heads possess the unique political capital generated by their religious designation – reinforced by the state no less. If muftis under authoritarian rule cannot be assumed to have no authentic voice of their own, the case in Lebanon is far clearer. The Mufti of the Lebanese Republic, as the office has been formally styled since 1932, is on the payroll of the state. But in practice that does not make the incumbent a mere instrument of the regime, nor should his individual influence be discounted or analytically subsumed as a cog into the mechanism of the state. The Lebanese mufti is not appointed by government, but is elected by an assortment of representatives of the clerical, political, and business sectors of the Sunni community. 66 Much like the mufti’s salary, the involvement of state officials is almost entirely ceremonial: the prime minister, as highest-ranking Sunni official, is responsible for presiding over the electoral session but has no privileged part in the process. Once elected, a mufti is virtually impossible to dislodge before the retirement age of seventy-three, after which he retains a salary in any case. The Lebanese Sunni religious establishment, moreover, is functionally autonomous by virtue of its separate treasury and income derived from waqf endowments, as well as the constitutional power of its legislative body – the Higher Islamic Shari’a Council, of which the mufti is president – to pass laws concerning the internal religious affairs of the community that carry the force of the state. The state itself, on the other hand, is a nebulous thing in Lebanon, neither unitary nor static. Structured around a principle of confessional power-sharing, precedence among its loosely-interconnected institutions has constantly been negotiated through creative strategies of cooperation or obstruction. The segmented nature of the Lebanese state therefore sets this case apart from the institutional contexts of state muftis in other countries: the image of a regime puppet assumes a single will pulling the strings, which is far from the The election and powers of the Mufti of the Lebanese Republic are governed by the provisions of Legislative Decree 18 of 1955 (with numerous amendments), which functions effectively as the constitution of the Sunni religious institution in Lebanon. 66

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reality of a power-sharing system. Even under French Mandate (1920–1943), when the state represented something more like a unified will, Lebanon’s muftis felt confident enough to speak out against policies handed down by colonial or local authorities. Drawing the Maronite patriarch into the same frame as the Mufti of the Republic sheds further light on the conditions that have produced the religious nationalist discourse elaborated in this chapter. It is often noted that the patriarch represents a virtually opposite model of religious organization from that of the mufti, by which is meant that the Maronite Church is institutionally separate from the state, whereas the official Sunni bodies were constituted by legislative decree. Certainly, it would be meaningless to call the patriarchate an organ of state propaganda – a point that helps emphasize the independent source of the religious nationalist ideology shared by patriarch and mufti. On the other hand, their shared conception of the nation should prompt us to ask what else they might have in common, and ultimately whether they are in fact structurally so different. Without going into a detailed ethnography, the contexts in which this chapter’s sources were produced provide some indications that the mufti and patriarch do actually operate within remarkably similar cultural fields. Holiday messages, especially those delivered from the pulpit on the two major Islamic and Christian festivals (‘Eid al-Fiṭr; ‘Eid al-Aḍḥa; Christmas; Easter), constitute the centerpiece of both leaders’ public discourse. While they may now and then address local congregations or the media in response to pastoral duties or significant news events, these annual occasions provide a regular platform for the elaboration of a longterm vision or manifesto addressing overarching issues. These events have been institutionalized as major fixtures in Lebanese public life, recognized by the state as national holidays. Much as the ‘secular’ holiday of Lebanese Independence Day (‘Eid al-Istiqlal) provides a national platform for the President of the Republic, the appointment of ‘religious’ holidays make these the preserve of the official religious leaders. On these occasions without fail, the mufti and patriarch are given the full attention of the media and state officialdom as the recognized doyens of (Sunni) Islam and (Maronite) Christianity. Thus, the president and prime minister or their senior representatives, as well as a host of other politicians and public figures, are by protocol expected to attend the

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celebrations held by the mufti and patriarch. In this way, the official designation of religious times and their attribution to the functioning of religious leadership (performed in certain recognizable religious places) generates exclusive annual opportunities for the mufti and patriarch to address the nation as the authoritative voices of Islamic and Christian religion in Lebanon. What is important in contextualizing their discourse, therefore, is perhaps not so much their institutional structures per se but the ways in which those structures are translated into a clearly defined place in Lebanese public life at the intersection of state and society. Through their equal participation in and ritualized recognition by a broad cross-confessional nationally-oriented elite, I suggest that they are enculturated into a mutual recognition of their equivalence as religious leaders – over and above their separate identifications as mufti and patriarch – and of the equivalent social functions of Islam and Christianity as religions. Rather than simply “defining Islam for the state” – SkovgaardPetersen’s phrase – the religious nationalism of the Lebanese mufti and patriarch could be said to arise out of their twofold function of representing the religious community to the national community as well as representing the national community to the religious community.

CONCLUSIONS

Lebanon’s official religious leaderships have become the champions of a pluralistic religious nationalism, the chief characteristics of which have been laid out in this chapter. This finding is particularly significant because it appears to contradict the scholarly orthodoxy that the salience of confessional loyalties bears an inverse relation to the formation of unifying national loyalties, and that the “success of sectarian organizations is a mark of the weakness of the state.” 67 It has been thought that the Suad Joseph, ‘Muslim-Christian Conflict in Lebanon: A Perspective on the Evolution of Sectarianism’, in Muslim-Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political, and Social Origins, Eds. Suad Joseph, Barbara Pillsbury, (Boulder, 1978), pp. 62–97. 67

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confessional system of government in Lebanon, with its attendant promotion of religious institutions and leaderships, was responsible for inhibiting the emergence of popular nationalism as the social bond between members of different religious groups, and between society and the state. The religious nationalist discourse accounted for here poses a clear case to the contrary on both counts of identity and institutional functions, since the spokesmen of this ardently statist form of nationalism are the heads of the “sectarian organizations” themselves. A major concern raised in Fanar Haddad’s work on sectarian nationalisms in Iraq is that although identification with the nationstate is being nurtured through communal cultural production, the result of this fragmentary production is what he calls “antagonistic visions of unity.” 68 The comparative study of Sunni and Maronite clerical discourse in this chapter shows that such antagonism is not a necessary result of confessional articulations of the nation in a multi-confessional context. There is a remarkable concurrence between the discourse of mufti and patriarch on the major themes of nation, state, and citizenship. Sceptics have dismissed their message as naïve or insincere, in either case assuming that a discourse presenting values of faith and moral virtue must be ineffective in the face of ‘real-world politics’. It is important to realize that, as Lynn Staeheli neatly puts it, “the invocation of responsibility, care and ethics does not deny or obviate politics.” 69 Staeheli’s work shows how ethical discourses can convey attempts to create new conceptions of belonging that redefine public space and are as such a vehicle for the re-structuring of power relations. In the case of Lebanon’s official religious leaders, their idealistic language of national salvation by faith and moral conduct represents a potentially powerful attempt to shift social consciousness from partisan formulations of confessional identity to a unifying confessional nationalism. Of course, the very artificiality of any attempt to define the content of a national Farad Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity, (London, New York, 2011). 69 Lynn A. Staeheli, ‘Citizenship and the problem of community’, Political Geography, 27 (2008), pp. 5–21. 68

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identity, even a pluralistic one, makes it a process of exclusion as well as inclusion. The formulation of a cross-confessional religious nationalism in Lebanon may be proposed as an inclusive solution to sectarianism, but it sits uncomfortably with the growing ‘Laicité’ movement in Lebanese civil society that refuses to be restricted by confessional categories. There is a need, I would suggest, for more comparative research across communities so as to explore the significance of cross-cutting structures associated with the state, such as that discussed here.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Robert N. Bellah, ‘Civil Religion in America’, Daedalus, 96/1 (1967), 1–21. Fanar Haddad, Sectarianism in Iraq: Antagonistic Visions of Unity (London, 2011). Ghassan Hage, ‘Religious Fundamentalism as a Political Strategy: The evolution of the Lebanese Forces’ religious discourse during the Lebanese Civil War’, Critique of Anthropology, 12/1 (1992), 27–45. Sune Haugbolle, ‘Spatial Representation of Sectarian National Identity in Residential Beirut’, in Visualizing Secularism and Religion: Egypt, Lebanon, Turkey, India, Eds. Alev Cinar, Srirupa Roy, Maha Yahya, (Ann Arbor, 2012), 308–334. Rola El-Husseini, Pax Syriana: Elite politics in postwar Lebanon (Syracuse, 2012). Suad Joseph, ‘Muslim-Christian Conflict in Lebanon: A Perspective on the Evolution of Sectarianism’, in Muslim-Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political, and Social Origins, Eds. Suad Joseph, Barbara Pillsbury, (Boulder, 1978), 62–97. Fuad I. Khuri, Imams and Emirs: State, Religion and Sects in Islam (London, 1990). Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago, 1988). Walid Phares, Lebanese Christian Nationalism (London, 1995). Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria: The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution (Cambridge, 2013).

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Maurus Reinkowski, Sofia Saadeh, ‘A nation divided: Lebanese confessionalism’, in Citizenship and Ethnic Conflict: Challenging the nation-state, Ed. Haldun Gülalp, (London, 2006), 99–116. Roschanack Shaery-Eisenlohr, Shi‘ite Lebanon: Transnational Religion and the Making of National Identities (New York, 2008). Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen, Defining Islam for the Egyptian State: muftis and fatwas of the Dar al-Ifta (Leiden, 1997). Lynn A. Staeheli, ‘Citizenship and the problem of community’, Political Geography, 27 (2008), 5–21. Bryan S. Turner, ‘Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Citizenship’, in Citizenship and Social Theory, Ed. Bryan S. Turner, (London, 1993), 1–18. ———, ‘Islam, Civil Society, and Citizenship: Reflections on the Sociology of Citizenship and Islamic Studies’, in Citizenship and the State in the Middle East: Approaches and Applications, Eds. Nils A. Butenschon, Uri Davis, Manuel Hassassian, (Syracuse, 2000), 28–48.

2. SYRIA’S LEBANONIZATION: AN HISTORICAL EXCURSUS WITHIN THE ‘NON-EXISTENCE’ OF SYRIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY MARCO DEMICHELIS 1 INTRODUCTION

The failure of the ‘Syrian Spring’ is unfolding before the eyes of the world. An analysis of possible outcomes and final resolutions is currently impossible, but one can assume that the pre–2011 Syria will not exist in the future: too many deaths, too much indiscriminate killing, too many inter-religious struggles. The failure of this country – which has played a significant role in contemporary Arab history from the end of WWI to the decolonization process and through the Cold War and into its aftermath – is symptomatically related to an identity fiasco that is largely attributable to the political leadership of the al-Assad family, but also, more generally, to a previous inability to shape a national distinctiveness able to accommodate the country’s varied religious and political peculiarities. It is important to note the irony that Syria, which tried to control Lebanon since the 1970s, and promoted a divide et impera policy, triggering a long civil war, was to undergo a very similar process. The Lebanonization of Syria, however, has taken much longer to occur and is only partially attributable to external factors. Dr. Marco Demichelis is a Marie Curie Fellow in the History of Middle East and Islamic Studies within ICS at the University of Navarra. 1

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The main topic of this article, it constitutes an historical journey in which Syria’s inability to build a true national identity emerges as symptomatic of a reluctance to feel part of an inclusive and pluralistic state. In Islam and the State, 2 Panayotis J. Vatikiotis discussed the abnormality and the weakness of Islam and its irreconcilability as a universal faith with a national identity. Such incompatibility persisted within the Ottoman Empire until its fall, as it attempted to combine different religious and national identities under an increasingly weak Sultanate. Istanbul’s failure to maintain control over its widespread empire, more similar to that of an earlier Islamic era than a national country, was due to its inability to prevent a subtle form of cultural 3 and economic 4 colonialism that, throughout the nineteenth century, exacerbated the clash within the weakening empire’s Millet system, particularly in relatively impoverished North Africa and the Balkans.

SYRIA MORE THAN SYRIA

The outbreak of WWI against the Triple Entente intensified the Committee of Union and Progress’ (CUP) and the Ottoman Sultan’s mobilization of Islamic symbols to encourage international help in protecting one of the last representations of sovereignty in the Islamic world. In November 1914, the Sultan (who also held Panayotis J. Vatikiotis, Islam and the State, (London, 1987). Phillip C. Allen, ‘Early Arab Nationalism and the Orthodox of Syria: A comparative approach to the sectarian environment’, The Arab Studies Journal, 1 (1993), pp. 43–45; Fruma Zachs, ‘Toward a protonationalist concept of Syria? Revising the American Presbyterian Missionaries in the nineteenth century Levant’, Die Welt des Islam, New Series, 41 (2001), pp. 145–173. 4 The Berat was a commercial certificate given to religious minorities of the Ottoman Empire (Christian Armenians, Jews, Orthodox Christians, Maronites, Latin Patriarchate Christians, etc.) that gave them the opportunity to pay less trade customs duties and enjoy tax exemptions, making them richer than their fellow Muslims. James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, (New York, 2008), tr. in Italian (Torino, 2009), p. 126. 2 3

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the title of caliph) issued a call to jihad to unite the Muslim community against the European aggressors. 5 Despite CUP suspicions of the loyalty of some Ottoman Arab subjects, particularly those Christian cultural and political associations in Greater Syria with historic connections to European powers, there was an absence of any openly anti-government riots. This supports an historic argument that emphasized Syria’s alliance with the Ottoman cause from the beginning. The CUP’s headquarters was established in Damascus under the leadership of Jamal Pasha, who, however, knowing that some members of the urban intelligentsia were in direct contact with Great Britain and France, encouraged the repression. The hangings in 1915–1916 of an Arab senator, leading journalists, three Arab parliamentary deputies and members of some of the most distinguished families in Greater Syria, managed to arouse intense anti-CUP sentiments in the entire country, without, however, breaking the loyalty of the most important elements of the local Arab élite to the Ottoman Empire. If this historical understanding is undeniable, the foundation, in Paris, of the Jamʿiyat al-ʿArabiyya al-Fatat in 1909 or 1911, indicated that more than seventy members in Greater Syria were in deep disagreement with the majority of their coreligionists. 6 Al-Fatat was the first pre-WWI organization to support the full independence of the Arab districts from the Ottoman Empire, as well as a Syrian platform of protest providing an opportunity to take part in a conversation with the Hashemite clan and the Arab revolt. Despite Antonius’ assertion that, ‘no other society had played as determining a part in the history of the national movement (as al-Fatat)’, 7 which is partially true concerning the role William L. Cleveland, A history of Modern Middle East, (Boulder, 2004), p. 153. 6 G. Antonious, The Arab Awakening, (London, 1938), p. 111; Dawn C. Ernest, From Ottomanism to Arabism: essays on the Origin of the Arab Nationalism, (Urbana, 1973), pp. 177–178; Russel Malcolm, The First Modern Arab state: Syria under Faysal 1918–1919, (Minneapolis, 1985), p. 72; James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties. Nationalism and Mass politcs in Syria at the close of empire, (Los Angeles, 1998), p. 55. 7 G. Antonious, The Arab Awakening, p. 111. 5

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played by the organization in coordinating the first Arab Congress in Paris (1913), 8 the results of the assembly were quite limited: a few statements about the use of Arabic and the creation of Arab militias in the different districts but not in war time. The Congress highlighted a real inability to understand the revolutionary historical phase that the Arab intelligentsia was beginning to undergo and was without any capacity to affect change. Such cultural associations, although motivated by the best intentions, represented only themselves and the increasingly nationalist attitude of an Arab cultural élite not particularly synchronized with the influence of the region’s entrenched Arab urban notables: Membership (in al-Fatat) was made subject to a long period of probation. Each recruit was introduced by one of the sworn members but was kept in ignorance of the identity of all the other members until he had been tried and proved, when he would be invited to take an oath to serve the ends of the society […] For the first two years, its centre was Paris; and its membership remained small: then, its founders graduated and returned to their homes, it was shifted to Beirut in 1913 and in the following years to Damascus. Its membership rose to over 200, all of whom were Moslems, with but a few Christians. 9

The Fatat’s geographic resettlement in Syria stimulated its efficiency and contacts with the supporters of an Arab uprising but also its divisions. 10 In May 1915, before the start of the revolt, Amir Faysal reached Damascus to encounter the leadership of al-Fatat and al- ‘Ahd. On this occasion, both associations subscribed to the ‘Damascus Protocol’, a document that underlined the terms of This was attended by reform-minded groups, such as the Jamʿiyyat Beirut al-Islahiyya, led by Salim ‘Ali Salam, the Arab League Society of Rashid Riḍa, the ‘Covenant Society’, or al-‘Ahd, the Literary Society of Istanbul and the League of Arab Patriots. 9 G. Antonious, The Arab Awakening, p. 112. 10 An important occurrence that transformed the organization, dividing it, with the muʾassisun (those who had joined Fatat before the end of WWI) outnumbered by the muhtasabun (new members), and increasing de facto internal divergence. 8

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agreement and Arab requests to the British, by which local secret organizations would offer their assistance to London’s cause in the region. 11 As reported by Robert J. and S. Hadawi, in The Palestinian Diary: Britain’s involvement 1914–1945, the protocol recites: The recognition by Great Britain of the independence of the Arab countries lying within the following frontiers: “North: The Line Mersin-Adana to parallel 37N and thence along the line Birejek- Urga- Mardin- Kidiat- Jazirat (Ibn ‘Unear)Amadia to the Persian frontier; East: The Persian frontier down to the Persian Gulf; South: The Indian Ocean (with the exclusion of Aden, whose status was to be maintained). West: The Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea back to Mersin. The abolition of all exceptional privileges granted to foreigners under the capitulations. The conclusion of a defensive alliance between Great Britain and the future independent Arab State. The grant of economic preference to Great Britain. 12

A detailed geographical document devoid of the confusion usually attributed to the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence, the British response, ‘the Declaration of the Seven’ was, as reported by James L. Gelvin, a masterpiece of ambiguity. The British pledged complete and sovereign independence to the Arabian Peninsula, already free from Turkish control, and to the areas where the Arab revolt made an important contribution during the war, such as Damascus, which was officially occupied by the Arabs after the battle of Megiddo (1918). 13 The geographical level of the debate during the war and after it is a topic too multifaceted to be addressed in this article, but it is important, nevertheless, to underline some limited aspects. There were at least two conflicting requirements – the Arab (reduced to the relationship between Britain and the Hashemite clan) and that Liora Lukits, ‘The Antonius Paper and the Arab Awakening over fifty years on’, Middle Eastern Studies 30 (1994), pp. 883–895. 12 S. Hadawi, J. Robert, The Palestinian Diary: Britain’s involvement 1914–1945, (London, 2006), p. 35. 13 James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, p. 155. 11

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of a Bilad al-Sham – to which a local Nationalist receptiveness would try to reconcile the concept of Greater Syria. 14 However, if the first tentative steps were reflected in the artificial and dictated creation of two Hashemite kingdoms in Iraq and Transjordan, due to the failure in achieving the first option – an Arab state as described within the Damascus Protocol, above – the Greater Syria project failed too for different reasons and a shared responsibility: first of all, the French mandate system and the disunity of the Arab-Syrian élite. 15 Al-Fatat, for example, was unable to preserve the organization due to family/clan interests within the post-conflict phase. The Bakri family, 16 with the figure of Nasib, became strongly allied with the Hashemite in the region, while the ‘Azm, a prominent Damascene family that played a significant role as wali under the Ottomans, rapidly increased their anti-Hijazi attitude and instead supported the French mandate system. During the war, the Syrian exiles in Egypt contributed to the idea of a Syrian singularity, a Syrianness, that dissuaded many of them from supporting the Arab Revolt and caused them to be considered real nationalists by their Egyptian colleagues. 17 ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kayyali, former president of the Arab Club in Aleppo, in his texts and poems emphasized the Syrian collective responsibility for their own liberation, assuming a pro-Faysal attitude that nevertheless remained more focused on Syrian suffering during the war than on promoting a real struggle for unity. In addition to the idea of complete Syrian independence in its natural boundaries 18 with no protection and no mandate, as clearly Akram Fouad Khater, Sources in the History of Modern Middle East, (Boston, 2004), p. 162. 15 M. Provence, The Great Syria Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, (Austin, 2005), p. 5. 16 James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, p. 57; M. Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt, p. 42; Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: the politics of Damascus 1860–1920, (Cambridge, 2003), p. 75. 17 James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, p. 154. 18 An independent Syria in its natural boundaries signified a Greater Syria that included the district of Antioch, Lebanon, all of Palestine and 14

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perceived by the King-Crane commission in 1919, the rise of a form of religious patriotism was clearly argued by the Metropolitan of the Eastern Syrian churches: ‘I proclaimed a new religion above all others, it is the religion of Arab unity which gathers together the children of the nation regardless of their faith.’ 19 This emphasized attention to the adage: ‘Religion belongs to God; the nation to all.’ A Syrian religious, proto-nationalist attitude that encouraged building a political community that disregarded religious affiliation, promoted reciprocal harmony to prevent France from intervening in favour of and to protect the Christian minority, but after France’s refusal to consider the King-Crane commission, an Islamization of political rhetoric and Kemalist propaganda, which called for Islamic unity and jihad against the Christian enemy, became more common. This potentially explosive situation would break out following the end of WWI, weakening Arab demands.

AN ELUSIVE IDENTITY UNDER THE FRENCH MANDATE AND THE FAILURE OF ‘GREATER SYRIAN’ IDEOLOGY

France’s responsibility in annihilating Syria’s unitary ambitions is historically undoubted, as is the Syrian national independence movement’s inability to achieve a high degree of unity, cohesion and organization. Local factions in Iraq, as in Palestine, began to break up the patriotic Greater Syria vision, also because in Damascus the leaders became embroiled in personal, clan and ideological disputes favouring the French intervention. As reported by Philip S. Khoury in Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism, 20 Syria’s internal configuration was dominated in 1918 by three nationalist organizations: the Palestinian Arab Club, the

the Fertile Crescent (Iraq), which were considered integral parts of this project. The natural borders of this region were: the Mediterranean Sea, the Sinai Peninsula, the gulf of ‘Aqaba, the Arabian deserts and the Zagros Mountains. 19 James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, p. 181. 20 Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables, p. 80; ‘Factionalism among Syrian Nationalists during the French Mandate’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 13/4 (1981), p. 442.

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Syrian al-Fatat Arab Independence Party and the al-’Ahd association, led by Iraqi military officers; a simplified but clear assembly already divided into geographical areas, that was greatly impacted by the European Mandate system and Faysal’s enthronement in Baghdad in 1921. A paradigmatic event that preceded European fragmentation of the Near East was the creation of the party of Syrian Unity at the end of 1918. This party was subscribed to by the majority of Syrian nationalist activists who had lived in Cairo during the war and who promoted a stronger Greater Syrian ideology, maintaining frequent contact with the British rather than with the pan-Arabist and anti-imperialist associations named above. The party of Syrian Unity tried to coordinate all the activities of Syrian and Palestinian associations within the Near East, and it organized a SyrianPalestinian executive Congress in 1921, when Syria and Lebanon were already under French control and while Palestine was under Britain’s within an artificial Kingdom of Transjordan. Moreover, a first internal schism occurred in 1922 when Palestinian representatives decided to withdraw from the Congress for its lack of attention to the Palestinian cause and the increasing Hashemite relationship with Zionism, as well as some of the Syrian members even suggesting reaching an agreement with the Jewish nationalist movement led by Chaim Weizmann. However, a deeper fragmentation occurred within the Congress, creating two main factions, the first led by the Lutfallah family 21 and ‘Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar, 22 and the second guided by Shakib Arslan 23 and the Istiqlal party. A Lebanese family that emigrated to Cairo, becoming particularly wealthy as moneylenders during the Anglo-Egyptian military expeditions in Sudan. The founder of the family, Michel, purchased cotton plantations with the revenues, becoming one of the most important landowners in the country. Their descendants developed strong links with the Hashemite family as advisers and bankers, increasing their support for the Arab cause during the decade of WWI. Philip S. Khoury, ‘Factionalism among Syrian Nationalists during the French Mandate’, p. 445. 22 ‘Abd al-Raḥman Shahbandar, a Syrian physician trained at the Medical School of the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut, was accused 21

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The opposition of these two internal claims to leadership was clearly seen in the former’s relations with the Hashemites and commitment to the British, and the latter’s deeper anti-FrancoBritish and more Islamic, religious affiliation. The Druze leader, Shakib Arslan, emphasized gaining a pro-German and Turkish nationalist support to boost the Arab movements in the territories with an emphasis on Islamic moral principles and divine law. Arslan also increased his support through active collaboration with Rashid Rida, 24 Ihsan al-Jabiri, 25 and the ultra-nationalist party of alIstiqlal, in which was emerging the figure of Shukri al-Quwatli (the first president of an independent Syria). The clash with the Lutfallah–Shahbandar faction (more secular and deeply associated with British economic and political interests in the region) erupted when Rashid Rida became an outspoken critic of the Hashemites, who described as corrupt and incompetent and subtly fostering their own interests rather than those of the Arab nation. Rather than suggesting an agreement with Zionism, the Arslan faction felt totally devoted to the Palestinian cause, in part because al-Istiqlal’s party was intimately connected with activists in the Nablus area, such as ‘Izzat alDarwaza, one of the protagonists of the Arab Congress of Paris of 1913. The positions became irreconcilable in 1924 when Sharif Hussain laid claim to the caliphate after the abolition of the same during the war of supporting Arab emancipation from the Ottoman empire and was forced to flee to Egypt to avoid being sentenced to death for ‘conspiracy’. He committed himself to the Hashemite cause and, returning to Damascus in 1919, became the official interpreter of Charles Crane. Khoury, ‘Factionalism’, p. 446. 23 William L. Cleveland, Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Nationalist campaign against the West, (Austin, 2011); Paolo Branca, Voci dell’Islam Moderno, il pensiero arabo musulmano fra rinnovamente e tradizione, (Genova, 1997), p. 121. 24 Rashid Rida, Al-Khilafa aw al-Imama al-Uzma, (Cairo, 1934), p. 57. 25 The Al-Jabiri family was one of the most important in Aleppo, with a role of religious and cultural leadership dating from the 18th century. Ihsan became mayor of Aleppo in 1920.

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by the Turkish National Assembly. The demand did not receive unanimous consensus, increasing the fragmentation and the harshness of the debate. Local leaders in many Syrian towns like Damascus and Aleppo obtained considerable religious support, but the majority of the Arab, Islamic religious establishment argued that the demand was mistimed. Rashid Rida accused the Hashemites of not being religiously qualified, of having used the Arab Revolt for personal ambitions and failing to create a unified Arab country, while acquiring political rule with the support of the British, behaviour that clearly vitiated the caliphate demand. 26 Moreover, the main reason behind this appeal was connected to the balance of power in the Arabian Peninsula, where ‘Abd al‘Aziz ibn Sa’ud was leading his Ikhwan (distinct from the Muslim Brotherhood) near the holy cities of Mecca and Medina to conquer, at the end of 1925, all of the Hijaz. Al-Sa‘ud’s victory increased the fragmentation of the Syrian political consensus, amplifying the contrast between pro and anti-Hashemite factions while the latter continued to lose support because of their intriguing and dishonest attitude. On the eve of the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 against the French, the internal fragmentation of the Syrian-Palestinian Congress and al-Fatat Arab Independence Party was chiefly inspired by pan-Arab and anti-British and anti-Hashemite sentiments. The historical understanding of the Great Revolt has over the past few decades shown a sharp contrast between those who actually assumed the honour and burden of military confrontation and those who, especially in the urban areas, were unable to support the efforts of the rural regions. As clearly emerged in Provence’s text, 27 the role played by the Druze and Bedouin population of the Jabal Hawran was prominent. 28 The Druze, under the leadership of Isma‘il al-Atrash, became in the second half of the 19th century the reference point for all the habitants of the region – Muslim and Christian – who paid an 26 27

p. 42.

28

Philip S. Khoury, ‘Factionalism’, p. 450. M. Provence, The Great Syria Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, Ibid., p. 33.

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annual tribute (khawa) for protection. The commercial agreements with Damascus’ cultural and political elite integrated the Hawran Druze fifty years earlier than other Syrian minorities like the ‘Alawis and Isma‘ilis. The Atrash consolidated a strong commercial relationship with the most important Maydani’s families (residing in the Damascus district of Maydan) such as the Sukkar, the Bitar, the ‘Aflaq and the Shuwayri. Finally, during WWI the Druze contributed to supporting the Arab Revolt and the British from 1917 and when Faysal’s military forces entered the capital, alongside the Hashemite leader, there was also the Sultan al-Atrash. The advent of the French mandate promoted a conflict in the rural areas in general, but in particular in the Jabal Hawran, due to the assimilationist attitude of the military officers who viewed Syrian rural society as requiring une mission civilisatrice. The successful French attempts to encourage the role of religious minorities in Syria and Lebanon, to increase internal fragmentation, but also to ensure minimum local support, failed in the Jabal Druze where the European military forces created a local council (majlis) of shuyukhs under their supervision. A paternalistic approach, a policy of public works based on corvée, in lieu of taxes and obligatory military conscription, aroused the opposition led by Sultan al-Atrash. The Great Syrian revolt started as a Druze uprising against French ineptitude in a limited geographical area, south of Damascus, in which Druze, Muslims and Christians resisted together, rendering meaningless the historicized French protection of Oriental Christians in the region. 29 Other factions only joined later, as Khoury notes: Although popular discontent in Damascus and other towns was increasingly daily, as result of economic paralysis and renewed political repression, the People’s Party (created in the same year as the Syrian-Palestinian Congress) had no plans at the time to launch an armed uprising against the French. It was only after Dr. Shahbandar and his comrades received strong indications that the Druze rebels were scoring military successes against the French army that the People’s Party

29

Ibid., p. 63.

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However, if, after an initial healing, a political and military partnership between the Druze and the Lutfallah–Shahbandar faction in the Syrian–Palestinian Congress was signed, at the outbreak of the Revolt, in 1925, the radical pan-Arabist group, led by the Arslan–Istiqlal coalition, was playing a more active role in the nationalist consensus of Syrian intelligentsia. This contingency would have weakened the impact of the Uprising, further fragmenting Syrian society. The political failure of all the Syrian forces except the Druze showed the immaturity of the urbanized nationalist parties when, in 1926, the French army reorganized and was able to fight back. In November 1925, while the Druze insurrection was already being quelled, Shakib Arslan was publicly invited to France to resolve the Syrian problem and proposed a diplomatic agreement: If France granted Syria independence, allowed the Alawite territory to become part of a unified country and permitted the Syrian district attached to Lebanon in 1920 to choose by plebiscite the state to which they wished to belong […] then the nationalists would be willing to concede to France exclusive economic and strategic advantages in the country such as the right to issue loans, to train the Syrian army, to establish a naval base on the Syrian coast and conclude a mutual defence treaty. 31

The proposal, implemented by the French to stall for time, created confusion, increasing the fragmentation within nationalist circles and enlarging the rift between the different groups supporting the Philip S. Khoury, ‘Factionalism’, pp. 454–455; Syria and the French Mandate: the Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945, (Princeton, 2014); ‘The Tribal Shaykh, French Tribal policy and the Nationalist movement in Syria between Two World Wars’, Middle Eastern Studies, 18/2 (1982), pp. 184–185. 31 M. Provence, The Great Syria Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, p. 125; Philip S. Khoury, ‘Factionalism’, p. 456. 30

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revolt. Lutfallah attacked Arslan for having decided to keep the Syrian–Palestinian Congress in the dark while reaching a personal agreement to enhance his prestige. This split clarified the political inability of Syrian nationalists, as the Druze army remained ever more isolated and incapable of stopping the reorganized French army, particularly as a result of a lack of funding and of urban commercial support for the fighters in the Jabal Hawran. The equivocal behaviour of a part of the Damascus elite, such as the ‘Azm and Jaza’iri clans, who were more interested in preserving their economic benefits with France than in really contributing to plan a strong insurrection in the capital (with the Druze forces not far from the city centre), decreased the opportunity of real success. 32 The uprising involved few areas of the country and the contribution from some minorities like the Alawite and the Christians was limited; the Druze faced the French quite alone. 33 The great revolt highlighted a lack of unity: the French policy of divide et impera had gone to reward different factions. In the 1930s – after the victory of Léon Blum’s Popular Front coalition in the French elections of 1936 – representatives of both countries signed a draft treaty to provide an alliance between France and Syria and granted France responsibility for the defence of Syrian sovereignty and the right to maintain air bases and military garrisons on Syrian soil. However, Blum’s leftist coalition unraveled in 1938 and the Franco-Syrian treaty was not ratified, plunging the country again under firm French control; only those Druze who had rebelled against Paris, re-established autonomy, together with the Alawite state on the Mediterranean coast. 34 If, in Lebanon, the French mandate stimulated the establishment of religion-based politics, increasing the Maronites’ aspirations for a geographical entity in which they were a relative majority, in Syria, on the contrary, the policy was to encourage the militarization of minorities (which also accentuated a more rapid process of internal secularization), the Alawite in particular, to 32

p. 100.

33 34

M. Provence, The Great Syria Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism,

Ibid., p. 94. William L. Cleveland, A history of Modern Middle East, pp. 224–225.

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destroy any sense of national unity. The Druze and Alawite identities, historically supported by ‘religious diversity’ and both expressions (for the Sunnis) of a spiritual deviation, and geographically rooted in rural areas, emphasized the differing ideas of a unified Syria: when Antun Sa’adeh implemented his vision of ‘Greater Syria’, establishing the Syrian Social Nationalist Party in 1934, the Lebanonization process in the area had already started and the idea of shaping an Arab country, geographically comprehensive of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and northern Iraq, was completely unfeasible. 35 At the end of the 1930s, the French parliament refused to ratify the treaties of 1936 as already reported above, with the additional aggravation of selling the district of Alexandretta to Turkey. 36 A new insurrection exploded in a densely-populated Alawite area (with a Turkish minority of 38%), but the repression was inexorable.

NATIONALISM AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD, AN UNEXPECTED RELATIONSHIP

The Syrian self-determination policy, successfully obtained with the end of WWII, did not generate a more substantial national unity than the previous one. Some old actors disappeared and a new nationalist bloc (al-Kutla al-Wataniyya) rebuilt the independence movement inside the country. As observed by Albert Hourani, with independence, the Syrian urban notables’ system, more prone to bow to Ottoman or European authorities than to assume a more nationalist approach, were able to maintain a prominent social and political role. For the first time, veteran nationalists no longer had to put themselves forward as arbitrators between the Ottoman state or French mandate and local society; they were the rulers of their own country, while the age of the ‘Azm and Jaza’iri clans was truly finished. The Politics of Notables was replaced by a politics of Akram F. Khater, Sources in the History of Modern Middle East, p. 162. Keith D. Watenpaugh, ‘Creating Phantoms; Zaki al-Arsuzi, the Alexandretta Crisis and the formation of Modern Arab Nationalism in Syria’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 28/3 (1996), p. 364. 35 36

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bureaucracies, 37 but also by a more regional policy: a politics of the countryside against the new established urban elite. The Great Revolt of 1925 had already demonstrated that an insurrection without the military forces of the rural areas was impossible, but also, that without the financial support of the urban elite, any insurrection would be short-lived too. In the post-colonial phase, the urban leadership would lose this recently gained power by failing to wed nationalism to state power, in highlighting a Syrian identity regardless of geography and religious identity. New political platforms (a national Syrian identity and a religious Syrian uniqueness) played an important role, but not within a real unification process; social and religious differences were preserved and stimulated. A growing middle class of students, teachers, mid-level military officers, small traders, moved mostly from rural areas to urban centres, demanded active inclusion in political decisions and destroyed the new equilibrium recently achieved with self-determination. Druze, Isma‘ilis and the Alawite in particular, redefined themselves, beginning to gravitate within new political organizations like the Syrian Communist Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist party and the Ba‘th. 38 The political struggle clearly emerged in promoting internal clashes between those who attempted to preserve their positions and those who tried from outside to overthrow the government by the use of military force. To control the army became, decade after decade, a major goal for a compact minority like the ‘Alawis: a dispossessed community (partially emigrated from the Alexandretta district after its inclusion in Turkey) with a heterodox brand of Islam and fiercely tribal, it played an increasingly important function within it. 39 The French had encouraged them to join the A. Hourani, ‘Revolution in the Arab Middle East’ in Revolution in the Middle East and Other Case Studies, Ed. P. J. Vatikiotis, (London, 1972), p. 71. 38 Philip S. Khoury, ‘Continuity and Change in Syrian Political Life: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, The American Historical Review, 96/5 (1991), p. 1393. 39 Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba’ath Syria, (Boulder, 1990), p. 160. 37

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defence forces during the mandate, considering entry into the military as a means of social advancement. However, it would only be after independence that the ‘Alawis began to penetrate the military in significant numbers, using their rural, regional and tribal solidarity to monopolize the highest levels of command. As reported by Hanna Batatu, At first, they aligned themselves with rural Sunni Muslims in the armed forces to weaken Sunnis from the towns, who were in control of the army immediately after independence. Then the ‘Alawis turned on their rural Sunni allies and the smaller minority communities such as the Druzes. 40

However, this increasing military and ‘Alawis positioning in the country could have been avoided, if politicians had not fragmented themselves in the 40s and 50s, and instead had emphasized a rediscovered national unity. A first mistake after independence was the centralizing policy: to reduce and abolish the communal representation in the parliament, in contrast with French policy during the mandate. The pan-Arabist and ultra-nationalist idea, even if with limited Druze and Alawite intelligentsia support, was to destroy the centrifugal forces through military measures that increased the violence and the sense of unity in the country. The crushing of a new Druze revolt in 1954 41 established the military primacy of the Hanna Batatu, ‘Some Observations on the Social Roots of Syria’s ruling military group and the causes of its dominance’, Middle East Journal, 35/3 (1981), pp. 331–344. 41 The Druze revolt of 1954 erupted after independence, during a succession of Sunni-dominated governments that strove to centralize political authority, eroding Jabal’s autonomy. The overwhelmingly Druze province of Suwayda, comprising the Jabal and its environs, was starved of development funds, while vast irrigation projects in other regions boosted agricultural production, driving down prices and impoverishing Druze farmers still further. The ‘Atrash family was forced to rely on illicit drug cultivation to maintain its patronage networks. In addition, the quelling of the 1954 Druze revolt marked a turning point in the balance of power between the central government and the mountain dwelling 40

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Syrian Army, but also increased the subsequent political activism of these minorities, in addition to their urbanization, as already explained. The second Syrian anomaly was connected to the inability to raise a political coalition able to maintain continuity not interrupted by military coups and external factors. The main coups (but not all) took place in 1949, 1951, 1954, 1961, 1963 and 1966, without a singular leader able to emerge as a real chief. Al-Kutla formed a solid bloc against the French, but after the treaty of 1936 and before independence was already splintered along regional and personal lines: the people’s party of Aleppo with Rushdi al-Kikhiya and Nazim al-Qudsi revolted against the leadership of Sa’adallah alJabiri (a member of the previous Ottoman-Arab intelligentsia) while the Republican party of Jamil Mardam in Damascus broke off with Shukri al-Quwwatli. The author of the 1949 coup, ‘Adib Shishakli, a Syrian of Kurdish origin and early member of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, militarised the new government, promoting the idea that the country would be led by the armed forces, dissolving the party system and becoming the first autocratic figure without charisma. Finally, the internationalization of Syrian policy, which engaged with Pan-Arab feelings and defended the Palestinian cause, also increased the internal tension. 42 The third error was the incomprehension which arose within the Ba’th (at the time, a still elitist party), between the Christian Michel ‘Aflaq, the Sunnite Salah ad-Din Bitar and the Alawite Zaki al-Arsuzi. Professor Arsuzi’s failure to preserve the Syrianess of the Alexandretta district and his move to Damascus – where, as an unemployed academic of philosophy and political thought, he became increasingly paranoid, irritable and depressed – unleashed an effective fragmentation within the party. In 1945, he received an heterodox communities. The Druze’s position against the military coup of Za’im and Shishakli was clear from the beginning. Moshe Ma’oz, Avner Yaniv, Syrian Under Assad: Domestic Constraints and Regional Risks, (London, 2013), p. 22. 42 Moshe Ma’oz, ‘Attempts at Creating a Political Community in Modern Syria’, Middle East Journal, 26/4 (1972), p. 398.

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offer to teach in Hama, he decided to quit political activism. 43 Even if al-Arsuzi bowed out of the movement, an increasing part of its followers, rural Alawis, continued to play a significant role within the Ba‘th, contributing, moreover, to a limited success: the Alawite Wahib al-Ghanim, during the parliamentary elections of 1947– 1949, was defeated in the Lattakia district. We would have to wait until the early 1960s to see a renewed political interest of the Alawite community in Ba’th with the entrance of a reliable number of military officers. Finally, the greatest error was the inability to increase political cooperation with the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood during the historical period after independence and before the 1970 Corrective Revolution exploded in the country, also adding further fragmenting religious identity. As reported by Joshua Teitelbaum, the Syrian Ikhwan was radically different from the Egyptian organization. If the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s and 1950s was an extra-parliamentary movement, sometimes the perpetrator of violence and murders, in Syria, the organization was small, elitist, not engaged in supporting the Egyptian branch and, during the decade 1947–1958, a parliamentary body that witnessed the political turbulence of this historical phase. 44 The importance and the wasted opportunity of working with the main Islamic organization before the advent of ‘Political Islam’, and prior to the oppressive Alawite policies against the Sunnis, revealed the Syrian case to be truly different from those of other Arab countries in which, from the beginning, the religious impact factor was predominant. In Syria, Sunni identity was important, but that of the minorities played a historical role clearly more permanent than that of the majority. The Brotherhood attended the 1947 parliamentary election as a normal political association: the Syrian Brotherhood did not found a national religious party but supported different Hanna Batatu, The Old Social classes and the Revolutionary movement in Iraq: a study of Iraq old landed and commercial classes and of its Communists, Ba’athists and Free Officers, (Princeton, 1978), p. 724. 44 Joshua Teitelbaum, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood and the Struggle for Syria, 1947–1958 between Accommodation and Ideology’, Middle Eastern Studies, 40/3 (2004), p. 134. 43

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candidates in connection with local decisions. Three candidates of the Syrian Ikhwan obtained parliamentary seats, the first time within any Arab or Muslim country. The Brotherhood’s political activism, under the founder of the Syrian branch, Mustafa al-Siba’i, 45 involved the association in the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948–1949, in which different units fought the Jihad until the end of the conflict. The Ikhwan afterwards supported, with the Ba‘th and the People’s Party, the increasing protests against the political ineptitude of government and Colonel Za‘im’s military coup against al-‘Azm administration, still connected with the previous bureaucratic system of the mandate. 46 The Brotherhood’s policy to enforce democratic reforms was not well received by the colonel, who singled out the Communist Party and the Islamic movement, declaring them outlawed with all the rest of the Syrian party system in May 1949. However, the increasing social activities of the Ikhwan, the foundation of a local newspaper, al-Manar al-Jadid, the formation of an Islamic Socialist Front, which emphasized the problem of corruption and the need for social equality (supporting progressive taxation, land reform, limitation of ownership and workers’ rights, and also assuming a more pan-Arab attitude), was importantly summarized by Mustafa al-Siba’i: We support all the Arab countries; we want the cancellation of artificial borders, and it is natural that we should begin with a union with Iraq. But we don’t want such a union to constrain the free and independent state of Syria. In addition, we are firm in our support of the republican form of government. 47

The post-1949 election, which led to the formation of a national assembly to draft a constitution, increased the impasse when the Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution, (Cambridge, 2013), p. 36. 46 Joshua Teitelbaum, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood and the Struggle for Syria, 1947–1958 between Accommodation and Ideology’, pp. 138– 139. 47 Gordon H. Torrey, ‘Syrian Politics and the Military 1945–1958’, Journal of Modern History, 37/4 (1965), p. 157. 45

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debate reached the topic of Islam as state religion of the country. Siba’i and his tone was above all quite pragmatic: he emphasized the importance of a national religion, mistakenly viewing the Israeli victory as rooted in a religious basis (while the secular platform of the first Israeli leadership is historically recorded), or arguing that the enshrining of Islam in the constitution would stimulate a greater attachment to the state. The draft constitution published in 1950 stated in Art. 3: ‘Islam is the state religion; others’ divine religions and religious minorities will be respected. There will be no discrimination between the citizens of the state on the basis of religion.’ 48 This was more accommodating compared to the 1930 constitution that declared ‘the religious head of Syria is Islam.’ Nevertheless, in the subsequent discussion, the accepted formula returned to that of 1930 and in addition, the article included the statement that ‘Islamic jurisprudence is the main source of legislation.’ A step backward in relation to the previous version, in which religious equality was guaranteed by law. In the early 1950s, even if the Ikhwan were showing a laudable political interaction within the Syrian party system, the Brotherhood had to deal with Shishakli’s militarization and antireligious approach. In March 1952, the government issued a decree outlining standard clothing for the ʿulama, and also prohibiting Muslims from sitting in coffee houses (presumably talking about politics) while wearing religious garments. In December 1952, Shishakli made his final move against his political opponents, claiming a ‘plot’ led by the Brotherhood, Ba‘th, the Arab Socialist Party and the Communist Party: the entire opposition. The elections of 1953 were boycotted and one year later, General Shawqat Shuqayr dissolved the parliament. The apex of Syrian Ikhwan political maturity was reached in December 1955 when, on the anniversary of the hanging of six Egyptian Brotherhood members by ‘Abd al-Nasser, the Syrian Brotherhood published an announcement in support of Egypt’s foreign policy, but expressing its determination to condemn its internal policy against the Islamic association. Majid Khadduri, ‘Constitution Development in Syria’, Middle East Journal, 5 (1951), pp. 137–160. 48

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In conclusion, the fifteen years that followed independence showed an unstable political situation, due to an inability to create solid coalitions able to promote needed reforms, even though the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood confirmed an increasingly collaborative attitude, supported by a clear national identity interwoven with an Islamic religious dimension, the movement, in spite of this, was unable to convince the Syrian majority to adopt a form of universal Arab socialism in which the word ‘Islamic’ increased an apprehensive attitude. The majority of Syrian society was still pursuing a secular idea of national identity.

THE ALAWITE LEADERSHIP AND RELIGIOUS CONFLICT WITH SUNNI ISLAM

The basic insight of the Ba‘th’s two founders and ideologues – Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah ad-Din Bitar – was that a united Arab nation had been divided by imperialist intrusion and that being Arab did not mean being Muslim; Islam was one of the greatest creations of the Arab nation, but is not the soul of the nation – Arabism is. 49 Moving from an elitist party, imbued with Unitarian and socialist values, the Ba‘th internally transformed itself in the decades following independence, assuming a less urbanized and intelligentsia-oriented profile, and increasing its rural support, especially among the middle-class farmers and landowners of the Alawi and Druze communities. As a consequence, the rurally based military officers gained access to a political organization and the Ba’th was gradually transformed into a vehicle of their interests. In particular after the failure of the United Arab Republic (UAR), the Ba’th retained its character as a nationalist middle-class movement; a previously nonexistent class-struggle ideology became more dominant, assuming a rural and military-civilian identity, both in relation to the influence played by Akram al-Hawrani within it, and to the historical period of the United Arab Republic, which showed that even without a proletarian revolution, the J. Galvani, ‘Syria and the Baath party’, Middle East Reports, 25 (1974), p. 5. 49

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nationalization of industry and businesses, as well as land reform, could be realized. The military coups of 1963 and 1966 involved the militarization of Ba‘th and the internal separation between the National Command and the Syrian Regional Branch. The first coup, moreover, was intended to restore unity with Nasser’s Egypt; the Ba‘th, however, remained sceptical of the opportunity. Syrian national identity was again showing its failure to cohere: Syrian Arab Nationalists (pro-Nasserists) engaged in political conflict with a Ba‘th party already divided itself between an older guard and a new military branch led by the Alawite Salah Jadid and Hafiz al-Assad. Additionally, the single-party system that the Ba‘th was establishing did not obtain the support of al-Hawrani and his Syrian Communist Party or of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was increasingly aware of the secular drift of the country. The majority of the Sunni Muslims were Arab Nationalists but not Ba‘thist, while the party was chiefly dominated by minority groups like Alawites, Druzes, Christians and Isma‘ilis, most of them from the countryside. However, the Neo-Ba‘th coup of 1966 and the Corrective Revolution led by Hafiz al-Assad against Salah Jadid, was accepted without upheavals in the country. The year 1970 is the paradigmatic date in which the majority of Syrians, after decades of political setbacks, accepted the existence of an autarkic regime, militarized and led by the Alawite minority. 50 The passage from an ‘old romantic Ba‘th party’, still politically unable to win a democratic vote (in the 1963 elections, before the coup, the Ba‘th had still obtained the electoral support of only 15% of voters), to the ‘scientific socialist Arab way to Socialism’, where the class struggle becomes predominant and the military’s hierarchical role too, was stimulated, as stated above, by increasing factionalism after the UAR’s failure and growing internationalist, leftist awareness. Moshe Ma’oz, ‘Attempts at Creating a Political Community in Modern Syria’, p. 401; Amos Perlmutter, ‘From Obscurity to Rule: The Syrian Army and the Ba‘th party’, The Western Political Quarterly, 22/4 (1969), p. 832. 50

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The original Syrian army was also decimated by coups and countercoups, leaving the Alawite officers to dominate first the high command, and then the entire state. In a decade, the Syrian Army emerged from the role of military force to become the political guardian of the country, and the ongoing secularization and radicalization of the forces increased the influence of a new generation of politicians, trained in the military structure. The army finally assumed the historical destiny of ‘saving’ society from the corruption of the politicians. 51 However, there is an important characteristic that, as during the Great Revolt of 1925, clearly emerges: the predominant Alawite role in the army and the leadership of the al-Assad clan within a new Syria. Under the regime, the Syrian economy shifted from an agrarian base to an industrial-commercial sector, while oil (even if not abundant) replaced cotton as the main source of foreign revenue. The arrangement of public sector dominance and private sector participation gave Syria ten years of economic prosperity that increased approval for the new leadership, transforming the Ba‘th into a complementary political organ in which corruption and cronyism quickly appeared. Assad’s foreign policy (in contrast with the previous decades in which Syria usually failed to appear as a leading country), thanks to greater internal stability, made Syria a regional power able to take independent decisions concerning Israel, Lebanon and international agreements. Finally, the Assad clan, like the Atrash family during the Great Revolt, emerged as the main actor in a society devoid of a true national identity, but rich in their minority and sectarian uniqueness. In spite of this, Assad’s most conspicuous predicament was the 1982 Hama massacre that branded his regime as a brutal, sectarian, Alawi dictatorship, murdering, suppressing and terrorizing many thousands of Sunni Muslims. 52 A. Perlmutter, ‘From Obscurity to Rule: The Syrian Army and the Ba‘th party’, p. 843. 52 P. Seale, Syria: The Struggle of Middle East, p. 326; William L. Cleveland, A History of Modern Middle East, p. 406; E. Rogan, The Arabs, (Italian version) p. 566; Th. Pierret, Religion and State in Syria, p. 188. 51

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The regime’s inability to preserve at least a superficial concept of Unitarian awareness was already visible in the 1970s, when the new constitution of 1973 banned any religious reference to the country. In contrast with the constitution of 1950, which still referred to Syria as a country rooted on an Islamic base, article 8 of the new version, enshrined the quasi-single party system, supporting the idea that the Ba‘th leads the state and society, without mentioning that the purpose of education is to raise ‘generations of believers’ and de facto banning outdoor Sunni religious celebrations. This was a direct attack on Sunni religious identity. The apex was reached when Hafiz al-Assad also proposed to add to the constitution a statement that it is non-compulsory for the president to be a Muslim. The Ikhwan rebelled, but in this case, too, the internal positions were different: Sa‘id Hawwa’s 53 petition, issued in Aleppo and subscribed to by the leading religious scholars, was considered too harsh by colleagues in Hama and Damascus, who decided to elaborate another text and to leave the final decision to Sheykh Habannaka, one of the leading religious figures at that time. In Homs, the same happened, and the local religious rulers wrote a third version of the petition; all of them were submitted to Habannaka who tried to moderate them but without great success. In the end, two of them were published in al-Hayat: the first described the authors of the constitution as enemies backed by colonialism, while the second called on Muslims to fight the partisan and sectarian domination. 54 However, a few days before publication, on February 20, Hafiz al-Assad backtracked, asking parliament to accept the wishes of the nation and the majority of Syrian religious authorities. The Hama uprising, in contrast to a more conciliatory approach in other Syrian urban areas, was symptomatic of the creation of an Islamic Front which, following an assassination attempt against Hafiz al-Assad, in June 1980, obtained the local support of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ʿulama. In November Itzchak Weismann, ‘Sa‘id Hawwa and Islamic Revivalism in Ba’thist Syria’, Studia Islamica, 85 (1997), pp. 131–154. 54 Th. Pierret, Religion and State in Syria, p. 187. 53

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of 1980, the Islamic Front, a militarized branch of the Ikhwan, which had staged a sporadic insurgency from 1976–1979 through a limited number of assassinations of prominent Alawi regime supporters, released a declaration of the Islamic revolution in Syria, which advocated the establishment of a relatively liberal Islamic state. 55 However, as previously happened, the Front experienced tensions and divisions concerning its religious and political components, splitting the Muslim Brotherhood and the religious Sunni base (at the time more than 65% of the entire population) within the country. Even in this case, the Alawite massacre against the Islamic Front in Hama froze an identitarian movement without improving the country’s unity but clearly preserving its Lebanonization process. Hafiz al-Assad’s subservient policy towards Iran during the 1980s 56 and the increasing pro-Shiite affiliation of Damascus within Lebanon 57 further fractured the already limited national unity of the country, amplifying the Shiite-Sunni conflict. Religion, after the Hama massacre, has therefore assumed a more symbolic sense of identity; this slaughter exacerbated a religious sense of belonging to internal communities, increasing national fragmentation and annihilating the plural and interreligious approach of the Syrian nationalist multi-party system of 1940s and 1950s. During the 1980s, as in the subsequent decades, to be a Christian identified you as a regime supporter, even if the individual person had never expressed this, and to be a Sunni a partial opponent. The process of sectarianism was intensified to obtain the unconditional support of all Syrian minorities, while the regime was acting, in an underground manner, to co-opt the support of part of the ʿulama, in particular in Damascus and Aleppo. Umar Abdallah, The Islamic Struggle in Syria, (Berkeley, 1983), pp. 128–187. 56 Yvette Talhamy, ‘The Syrian Muslim Brothers and the Syrian – Iranian Relationship’, Middle East Journal, 63/4 (2009), pp. 561–580. 57 Asad Abukhalil, ‘Syria and the Shiites: Al-Asad’s policy in Lebanon’, Third World Quarterly, 12/2 (1990), pp. 1–20. 55

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CONCLUSION: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF SYRIA AND ITS MULTIPLE RELIGION UNIQUENESS

The regime’s nepotistic changeover, after the death of Hafiz alAssad in 2000, granted a fleeting illusion that a proto-democratic change could be possible. 58 On the contrary, after the rapid failure of the ‘Damascus Spring’ in 2000–2001 and the ‘Statements’ of 99 and of 1000, in which a culturally fomenting civil society tried to push the new leader towards a multi-party system, came the ‘Winter’ and the suppression of such movements again became the normal praxis. Unexpectedly, Bashar al-Assad, showed his ability but also arrogance in revolutionising the country’s political, economic and military leadership during the years after his father’s death, ousting an old guard led by actors like Mustapha Talas and ‘Abdul ‘Alim Khaddam and bringing in a new intelligentsia like Shawkat Assad, Rami Makhlouf and Maher Assad (his younger brother), as reported by regime cronies and hidden sources. This radical internal changeover also weakened the Syrian autocracy, promoting internal divisions that reflected mistakes and superficiality such as that related to Kanaan Ghazi’s suicide (in 2005), in direct connection with Rafiq Hariri’s murder (in 2004) in Lebanon. However, the failure of Syria’s Arab Spring in 2011 gave confirmation to the basic assumptions that emerged in this article: the country’s inability to build a national identity, the confirmation of deep internal religious divisions, the political inability to lead a multi-religious and multi-ethnic state and the Lebanonization of Syria as previously promoted by Damascus in the neighbouring country. The Alawite leadership has increased this attitude, preserving from this forma mentis only the economic elite, which partially remained multi-religious. The existence of a Syrian elitist party-power, from the beginning of the 20th century, is indicative of the fact that no ideological-political recipe has ever convinced the majority of Syrians, and even the Ba‘th, before the autarkic deviation of 1966, 30.

58

Alan George, Syria, Neither Bread, nor Freedom, (London, 2003), p.

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has never attained a relative majority. The interest in politics has remained connected with a clan and a familial elitism that has rarely brought the masses to manifest an active understanding. This characteristic is probably attributable, on the one hand, to limited Syrian urbanization: until the end of WWII, only Damascus and Aleppo could be considered important urban areas. While, on the other, as reported by Philip S. Khoury in Urban Notables, is the long-lasting Ottoman system of urban elites that until the demise of the Sultanate played a deeply rooted role. As stated earlier, until Syrian independence in 1946, the old Ottoman primary form of control through families headed by the ‘Ajlanis, Ghazzis, Kaylanis, ‘Azms, Jaza’iris, etc. still survived, weakening any attempt to reform or rise against (as in the Great Revolt of 1925) the French mandate. When, after 1946, the Ottoman system rapidly collapsed, the pan-Syrian party system was unable to promote national unity, fragmenting the National Bloc and increasing the military’s role: the only state authority linked to a non-Syrian background. In addition, the presence of peculiar minorities like the Druze and the Alawi (which, under the Mandate, were endowed with great authority in a detached state and within the army) augmented their sense of national consciousness, which became particularly important with their urbanization process after independence. In other words: a cohesive new political system had not yet been created, so any balances were upset by a new minority of militarized elites. Finally, Islamic revanchism and the Alawi’s over-secular and pro-Shiite approach have amplified the Lebanonization of the country, rediscovering a religious identity that Islamic Sunni and Christian communities have strongly encouraged in recent decades, expressing conflicting worries. A sectarian religious nationalism made an eventual success of the Syrian Spring quite impossible, but must also be understood in relation to three relevant factors: the internationalization of the Sunni and Shi‘a conflict from the 1980s, neighbouring Lebanon’s civil war fragmentation and the absolutism of the Alawi nationalist secularization attitude.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Umar Abdallah, The Islamic Struggle in Syria, (Berkeley, 1983). Asad Abukhalil, ‘Syria and the Shiites: Al-’Asad’s policy in Lebanon’, Third World Quarterly, 12/2 (1990). Phillip C. Allen, ‘Early Arab Nationalism and the Orthodox of Syria: A comparative approach to the sectarian environment’, The Arab Studies Journal, 1 (1993). Akram Fouad Khater, Sources in the History of Modern Middle East, (Boston, 2004). G. Antonious, The Arab Awakening, (London, 1938). Hanna Batatu, The Old Social classes and the Revolutionary movement in Iraq: a study of Iraq old landed and commercial classes and of its Communists, Ba’athists and Free Officers, (Princeton, 1978). ———, ‘Some Observations on the Social Roots of Syria’s ruling military group and the causes of its dominance’, Middle East Journal, 35/3 (1981). William L. Cleveland, A history of Modern Middle East, (Boulder, 2004). Dawn C. Ernest, From Ottomanism to Arabism: essays on the Origin of the Arab Nationalism, (Urbana, 1973). J. Galvani, ‘Syria and the Baath party’, Middle East Reports, 25 (1974). James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, (New York, 2008), tr. in Italian (Torino, 2009). ———, Divided Loyalties. Nationalism and Mass politcs in Syria at the close of empire, (Los Angeles, 1998). Alan George, Syria. Neither Bread, nor Freedom, (London, 2003). S. Hadawi, J. Robert, The Palestinian Diary: Britain’s involvement 1914– 1945, (London, 2006). Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba’ath Syria, (Boulder, 1990). Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: the politics of Damascus 1860–1920, (Cambridge, 2003). ———, Syria and the French Mandate: the Politics of Arab Nationalism, 1920–1945, (Princeton, 2014).

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———, ‘The Tribal Shaykh, French Tribal policy and the Nationalist movement in Syria between Two World Wars’, Middle Eastern Studies, 18/2 (1982). ———, ‘Factionalism among Syrian Nationalists during the French Mandate’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 13/4 (1981). ———, ‘Continuity and Change in Syrian Political Life: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, The American Historical Review, 96/5 (1991). Liora Lukits, ‘The Antonius Paper and the Arab Awakening over fifty years on’, Middle Eastern Studies 30 (1994). Malcolm Russel, The First Modern Arab state: Syria under Faysal 1918– 1919, (Minneapolis, 1985). Moshe Ma’oz, ‘Attempts at Creating a Political Community in Modern Syria’, Middle East Journal, 26/4 (1972). Amos Perlmutter, ‘From Obscurity to Rule: The Syrian Army and the Ba’th party’, The Western Political Quarterly, 22/4 (1969). Thomas Pierret, Religion and State in Syria. The Sunni Ulama from Coup to Revolution, (Cambridge, 2013). M. Provence, The Great Syria Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism, (Austin, 2005). Yvette Talhamy, ‘The Syrian Muslim Brothers and the Syrian – Iranian Relationship’, Middle East Journal, 63/4 (2009). Joshua Teitelbaum, ‘The Muslim Brotherhood and the Struggle for Syria, 1947–1958 between Accommodation and Ideology’, Middle Eastern Studies, 40/3 (2004). Gordon H. Torrey, ‘Syrian Politics and the Military 1945–1958’, Journal of Modern History, 37/4 (1965). Panayotis J. Vatikiotis, Islam and the State, (London, 1987). Keith D. Watenpaugh, ‘Creating Phantoms; Zaki al-Arsuzi, the Alexandretta Crisis and the formation of Modern Arab Nationalism in Syria’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 28/3 (1996). Fruma Zachs, ‘Toward a proto-nationalist concept of Syria? Revising the American Presbyterian Missionaries in the

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3. NATION-NARRATING MONARCHIES: THE RELIGIOUS ‘SOFT POWER’ OF THE MOROCCAN AND JORDAN KINGS MENNO PREUSCHAFT 1 [T]his is a fight between moderates and extremists the world over. And it might be a long, hard slog but it’s a fight for the future of Islam and the future of the Arab world. So, it’s a fight we have to win. Winning also depends on our ability to conquer the philosophical battleground as well. Because at the heart of this assault is an ideology. 2

INTRODUCTION

With the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’ (IS) rattling the ever-shaky balance of stability, peace and security in the Arab Middle East and North Africa, the questions of what constitutes collective (or national) identity in each state of the region, and what role religion will play in the future of the region at large, and in each state in particular, have taken on greater urgency. The excerpt from the opening speech by Queen Rania at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit 2014 cited above can be read as an expression of a feeling of urgency with which the political leaders Dr. Menno Peruschaft is Head of the Preventions Department of Radical Salafism and anti-Muslim Racism at the Council of Crime Prevention in Lower-Saxony (Germany). 2 Queen Rania of Jordan, “Opening speech at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit Abu Dhabi 2014”, (Abu Dhabi, November 18, 2014). 1

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still in power in the broader Arab neighbourhood of IS view the threats the latter and its adherents pose, both, to stability and peace on the domestic level, and to the region. Moreover, the quotation also reflects the relevance that political leaders in the region give to Islam in the quest for political stability, and with regards to the recent ‘fight’ against the fundamentalist ‘spirits that have been called’ in former decades and that now ignore any commands except their own; or God’s commands, according to their own perspective. Against this current backdrop this paper argues that various political actors in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) use religion in order to reach specific political goals. Put differently, religion – specifically Islam – works as a ‘soft power instrument’ by which political actors try to ‘get what [they] want through attraction rather than coercion or payments’. 3 The concept of soft power is primarily applied in the field of international relations to describe an indirect way of wielding power and influence. Accordingly, states make use of norms and economic and cultural influence to shape the preferences and behaviour of other actors in the political field in a way that suites their interests. At best, the use of soft power can convince other political actors or social groups to accept one state’s interests as their own. The following article examines religion as a soft power tool that is not only of relevance in the field of international relations, but comes into play at the domestic level of politics as well. In examining religion as a soft power tool, this article pays particular attention to the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco. Besides having proven comparatively stable in the recent regional crises, both ruling families utilize religious narratives in order to legitimise their right to rule. The Hashemite royal family of Jordan claims to be descended from the Prophet Muhammad and to be the protectors of al-Quds (Jerusalem), the third holiest place in the Muslim world. The Moroccan kings, moreover, also claim to be Jospeh S. Nye, Soft Power. The Means to Success in World Politics, (New York, 2004), p. x. 3

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descendants of the Prophet, and carry the title of amir al-muʾminin (commander of the faithful), claiming actual religious authority. However, describing religion as a soft power instrument in the hands of the Jordanian and Moroccan monarchies goes beyond the mere function of legitimating their rule. Rather, it can also serve at least two other purposes on behalf of the monarchical rulers: constructing a national identity narrative and de-legitimising political competitors. While both aspects are related to regime legitimation, this paper distinguishes between the three manners in which religion is used by these two regimes: legitimation, identity construction, and de-legitimation of opponents. With regard to all three aspects, religion can be further described as soft power in two meanings of the word. It is open to interpretation, especially when a specific religion is based on a scripture and revelation, such as the Qurʾan and the Sunna. This openness to interpretation results in a form of flexibility, making religion particularly attractive for exploitation by political actors. Additionally, religion provides a strong basis for legitimizing politics and policy. Religion, seen as transcendental and eternal, may confer indisputability – at least partially – upon the political, rendering the policies and dictates of political leaders beyond reproach. However, this paper does not claim that describing religion as a soft power tool excludes the use of hard power in any way. In fact, utilising religion as an instrument of soft power in many cases could not properly work (e.g., in securing a regime’s interests) if hard power measures were not readily consulted at the same time. Indeed, with regard to Jordan and Morocco, the institutionalisation of religion, with the monarchs as central players, is crucial for promoting a certain interpretation of religion. It allows for the coopting of religious and conservative elites, as well as for the countering of Islamist opponents. The focus below will be on the utilization of religious soft power in the context of national identity construction. The paper more specifically aims to examine how Islam is being connected to a Jordanian – and a Moroccan – national identity concept by the monarchist rulers of each of the two countries. The paper asks: What are the particularities (as opposed to the universality of Islam per se) of the understanding of Islam in these national identity concepts? Is there a Jordanian-Islamic (and, respectively, a

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Moroccan-Islamic) feature in each countries’ national identity concept?

JORDAN

Jordan has often been described as ‘the ideal type of the artificial state created by the colonial powers’. 4 However, despite multiple, potential identity constructs – Bedouin versus urban dwellers, or ‘East-Banker’ versus Palestinian – that contest with each other and undermine the project of building a single national identity, the current relative stability, as well as Jordan’s historical longevity, suggest a rather consolidated status of state and monarchy. Even though Islam cannot be said to be the single denominator – not even the single most important – in achieving such consolidation, it nevertheless is of some relevance to Jordan’s longevity and national identity. First and foremost, Islam is of importance to the legitimisation of the Hashemites’ claim to rule: they refer to themselves as descendants of the family of the Prophet Muhammad. In addition to this Islamic aspect of lineage, the Hashemites’ Islamic narrative of legitimacy also carries a functional aspect: their role as custodians of the holy sites in Jerusalem (Arabic: al-Quds) and Islam’s third most holy place, the al-Aqsa Gudrun Krämer, ‘Good Counsel to the King: The Islamist opposition in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco’, in Middle East Monarchies. The Challenge of Modernity, Ed. Joseph Kostiner, (Boulder, 2000), p. 258. For the same argument, Russell E. Lucas, Institutions and the Politics of Survival in Jordan. Domestic Responses to external Challenges, 1988–2001, (New York, 2005), p. 14. In fact, Brand states, “that many countries in the third world are artificial entities, and […] largely the products of their colonial pasts, Jordan provides one of the more extreme cases” (Laurie A. Brand, ‘‘In the Beginning was the State…’: The Quest for Civil Society in Jordan’, in Civil Society in the Middle East, Vol. 1, Ed. Richard August Norton, (Leiden, 19951), p. 153. Also, against the historical background of Jordan’s creation, Susser has pointed out that “[o]ddly enough, the most successful of the Hashemite monarchies appeared at the outset to be the most artificial and least likely to cross the threshold into the family of nations”, Asher Susser, ‘The Jordanian Monarchy: The Hashemite Success story’, in Middle East Monarchies, Ed. Joseph Kostiner, p. 88. 4

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Mosque. Including their historical custodianship over Mecca and Medina from 1201 to 1925, the Hashemites point to a century long, prestigious history of responsibility for the Muslim world’s three holiest sites. However, the kings of Jordan cannot and do not claim religious authority as a feature of ‘Islamic’ legitimization, which would enable them to decide dogmatic questions regarding religious law. 5 Nevertheless, the combination and interplay of these aspects of Islam (lineage and function) are of relevance beyond mere regime legitimisation, and affect collective (that is, national) identity. In fact, as Lucas has pointed out, Jordan is one of those Middle Eastern countries in which ‘the regime predates the existence of the modern state’. 6 This holds true with regards to the Hashemite tradition of rule in the Hijaz region of Saudi Arabia, and as such relies on the functional aspect of ‘Islamic’ legitimisation (being, as the family was, custodian of Islam’s holiest sites). Additionally, however, and according to the Hashemite’s narrative of monarchical history, the ‘qualification to rule’ predates even this period of rule over the Hijaz, and dates to the earliest days of Islam itself. Highlighting a claimed link to the Prophet Muhammad, the ruling family uses the rather uncommon expression al-risala alhashimiyya (the Hashemite message) as a synonym for al-risala alislamiyya (the Islamic message) and describes the Prophet Muhammad as ‘the Hashemite Muhammad’. 7 This is not intended to highlight an exceptional religious quality on the part of the Hashemite Sharifs, but rather their particular role in the history of Islam. Neveu draws attention to the interconnectedness of Islamic heritage, tourism, and politics, pointing out in her study that sites connected to early Islamic history, such as the Umayyad period or the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad, are utilised politically by the Jordanian monarchy ‘to publicly rewrite the national Islamic Krämer Gudrun, ‘Good Counsel to the King’, p. 258; Judith Jolen, The Quest of Legitimacy. The Role of Islam in the State’s Political Discourse in Egypt and Jordan (1979–1996), (Nijmegen, 2004). 6 Russell E. Lucas, Institutions and the Politics of Survival in Jordan, p. 13. 7 Jonas Teichgreeber, Das hashimitische Herrschaftssystem unter König ʿAbdallah II, (Berlin, 2013), pp. 74–75. 5

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history focussing on the historical continuity between Jordan’s contemporary rulers and the golden age of Islamic history conquest’. 8 On the contrary, claiming some exceptional religious knowledge or characteristic, as believers or possessors of some sort of religious charisma, could even prove counterproductive to the interests of Jordan’s ruling family. What is intended, rather, is to underscore the essential rootedness of today’s Jordanian kings in Islamic history as a part of the fourteen hundred-year-old Islamic Umma. Therefore, the royal family presents itself as primus inter pares, sharing with the vast majority of ‘average’ Jordanians a feature of individual and collective identification: the ‘master signifier’ 9 of Islam. Consequently, the Jordanian kings have repeatedly referred to their lineage in order to secure loyalty. Susser claims that in the process of integrating the Bedouin tribes of the region into the state (along with additional measures), King Hussein and King Abdallah were able to ‘further enhanc[e] their appeal to tribal soldiers’ by relying on lineage and a religious and argument, 10 the former of which is also one of noble tribal ancestry. 11 The shared bond of identity between the Hashemite and the Jordanian people is given a more specific exemplification with reference to custodianship over Jerusalem: Jules has pointed out that King Hussein highlighted the collective efforts of the royal family and the Jordanian people to protect the Holy City, e.g. in the 1948 war. 12 Thereby, one may argue, the proclaimed responsibility of the Hashemites over Jerusalem is extended onto the Jordanian Norig Neveu, ‘Islamic tourism as an ideological construction: A Jordan study case’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 8/4 (2010), p. 335. 9 Peter Mandaville, Transnational Muslim Politics. Reimagining the Umma, (London, 2001), p. 55. 10 Asher Susser, ‘The Jordanian Monarchy’, p. 93; Laurence Axelrod, ‘Tribesmen in Uniform: The Demise of the Fida’iyyun in Jordan, 1970– 1971’, Muslim World, 68/1 (1978), p. 449. 11 Asher Susser, ‘The Jordanian Monarchy’, p. 98. 12 Judith Jolen, The Quest of Legitimacy, p. 162. 8

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nation as a whole in order to strengthen the mutual identification between people and rulers. Given the rooting of Hashemite custodianship over al-Quds in Islamic history, the identification of Muslim Jordanians with this special responsibility is rather obvious. However, the Jordanian monarchs are equally concerned with integrating Christian Jordanians into the narrative of collective responsibility for Jerusalem. 13 Recently, in a speech to the international community, King Abdullah II, with reference to the IS threat and the 2014 Gaza crisis, highlighted the connectedness of his family to the Christian Arabs of the Middle East and the Christian Holy Places of Jerusalem. The king expressed that: Islam prohibits violence against Christians and other communities that make up each country. Let me say once again: Arab Christians are an integral part of my region’s past, present, and future. […] Jordan strongly opposes threats to Jerusalem’s Arab Muslim and Christian identity. As Hashemite custodian of Jerusalem’s Muslim and Christian Holy Sites, I will continue to oppose any violation of Al-Aqsa Mosque’s sanctity. 14

On other occasions, such as the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Jordan in May 2009, Abdullah II has stressed the importance of Jerusalem to his government and people. In his description of the visit, Abdullah pointed out that Jerusalem is not just of importance to today’s Muslim Jordanian population, but – for obvious religious reasons – equally important to Christian Jordanians. Moreover, in his book Our Last Best Chance, Abdullah points out the responsibility of his government and Jordan as a whole for ‘Christian Jerusalem’ as the ‘head of its [the Christian population’s] largest denomination […] is the Orthodox Patriarch of Alexander Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, (Brighton, 2002), p. 91. 14 Abdullah II of Jordan, “Remarks by His Majesty King Abdullah II at the Plenary Session of the 69th United Nations General Assembly”, (New York, September 24, 2014). 13

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Jerusalem’. 15 Finally, Abdullah described the pope’s visit as ‘a celebration of Jordan’s religious tolerance’. 16 In summary, presenting the protection of ‘both Jerusalems’ 17 (i.e. Muslim and Christian) as a collective responsibility for all Jordanians – royal and subject, Muslim and Christian, East Bankers and West Bankers – is supposed to serve as a point of reference for collective identification between rulers and the ruled, as well as between different groups amongst the Jordanian population. Finally, referring to the specific bond with Jerusalem provides a certain degree of particularity to this aspect of the national identity narrative, which is ‘Islamic’ without being exclusionary, neither with regard to the greater Muslim world and its diversity, nor with regard to non-Muslim Jordanians. What makes the reference to Jerusalem as a symbol for national identity more exceptional is that the symbolic power of the custodianship narrative withstood even the Jordanian monarchs’ loss of territorial control over the West Bank and Jerusalem in 1967. Bligh has pointed out that many ‘of the references [by King Hussein] to Jerusalem are more emotional and religious than political, but this approach cannot hide the detailed use of Jerusalem as [a] pillar of Jordanian nationalism’. 18 Taking into account Hillel Frisch’s argument that the fuzziness and ‘boundlessness of Jordanian state identity and borders’, 19 as promoted by the monarchy itself, serves the regime’s essential interest of security and stability, the reference to an extra-territorial Abdullah II of Jordan, Our last best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril, (New York, 2011), p. 262. 16 Ibid., p. 263. 17 Bligh hints at Kings Hussein’s repeated usage of the term “Arab Jerusalem” as a reference to the area including the Holy places and the Arab neighbourhoods surrounding it – a term, which highlights the symbolic value of this terrain to the Arab world in general and the Hashemite family, in particular. Alexander Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, p. 91. 18 Alexander Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, p. 91. 19 Hellel Frisch, ‘Fuzzy nationalism: The case of Jordan’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 8/4 (2002), p. 88. 15

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symbol for national identity appears less striking. Frisch adds to Laurie Brands’ argument on the utilisation of Pan-Arab rhetoric by the Jordanian monarchs: Basing their rule on a commitment to Arabism rather than a more local form of affiliation is crucial for the Hashemites because they themselves are latecomers to Jordan […]. The regime’s repeated appeal to Arabism and characterization of Jordan as a home for all Arabs is also essential given the presence in the kingdom of large numbers of citizens who, like themselves, are not rooted in the East Bank. 20

The reference to Arabism, according to this argument, serves the integration of the Palestinian citizens into a national identity narrative, and aims to ‘create a hybrid identity for both [the Transjordanian and the Palestinian] communities’. 21 Likewise, establishing Jerusalem as an icon of national identity furthermore perfectly serves the creation of identification between monarchy and people, as well as between communities of different backgrounds inside Jordan. The Jerusalem narrative fuses ethnic (i.e., Arab) and (inter-)religious (i.e., Muslim and Christian) affiliations in one single symbol of collective identity. In fact, rhetorically highlighting a tolerant interpretation of Islam also fits with the utilisation of religion by the Jordanian monarchy. Initiatives such as ‘The Amman message’, of 2004, and ‘A common Word between Us and You’, of 2007, are meant to underscore Jordan’s dedication to interreligious dialogue and tolerance on the international level. However, documents such as the Amman Message do imply domestic and regional causes and aims, which are ‘more political than religious’, as Michaelle Browers’ analysis suggests. 22 In fact, taking into account the social and political objectives that led to the formulation of the Amman Laurie A. Brand, ‘Palestinians and Jordanians: A Crisis of Identity’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 24/4 (1995), p. 51. 21 Ibid., p. 50. 22 Michaelle Browers, ‘Official Islam and the Limits of Communicative Action: the paradox of the Amman Message’, Third World Quarterly, 32/5 (2011), p. 944. 20

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message, the domestic message of propagating ‘true Islam’ is very much aimed at the ‘containment of dissent’. 23 This analysis is given further backing when recent regional challenges and Jordanian reactions to them are taken into consideration. For instance, Jordanian officials increasingly stress the tolerant nucleus of Islam. At a mandatory meeting in the city of Zarqa in November 2014, the Jordanian Minister of Islamic Affairs, Hayal Dawood, gave advice to hundreds of imams to ‘preach moderate Islam’ 24 and refrain from supporting sectarianism, jihadism and extremist ideas. The aim of this campaign is to undermine any identification with the IS, and to strengthen solidarity with the monarchy. Consequently, speakingup against the king and the royal family has also been defined as a red line for Jordanian imams, be they private citizens or state employees. 25 In fact, making the promulgation of tolerant and peaceful Islam obligatory also indicates that there are two sides to the coin of religious ‘soft power’ utilisation in Jordan, the second of which is connected to hard power instruments: in the second half of 2014, Jordanian authorities began to crack down on alleged sympathizers and supporters of IS inside the kingdom, making use of an anti-terrorism law that was amended in July 2014. By broadening the definitions of terrorist acts and support, and making them more ambiguous, authorities were provided with a strong tool to counter politically undesirable ideas and voices, which are often presented in religious terms. 26

Ibid., p. 948. William Booth and Taylor Luck, ‘To counter rise of Islamic State, Jordan imposes rules on Muslim clerics’, The Washington Post, (November 9, 2014). 25 William Booth and Taylor Luck, ‘To counter rise of Islamic State’. 26 Areej Abuqudairi, ‘Jordan wages war against ISIL at home’, alJazeera, (December 7, 2014). 23 24

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Both the ‘public relations effort[s]’ 27 of the ‘Jordan First’ initiative, with its nationalist undercurrent, and the propagation of a moderate version of Islam reflected underlying political intentions aimed at specifying a Jordanian identity. Indeed, both were put forth by the monarch to exclude allegedly ‘un-Jordanian’ behaviour (i.e., un-patriotic in the case of the ‘Jordan First’ initiative, and unIslamic behaviour, in a specifically Jordanian sense (in the case of the “Amman Message” and initiatives propagating tolerant Islam), as well as to counter outside influences, 28 be they religious or ideological.

MOROCCO

In contrast to the case of the Jordanian monarchs, the religious legitimisation narrative of the Moroccan monarchy goes beyond mere lineage and function, though both aspects are present in the Moroccan narrative. The Moroccan kings also claim theological standing (baraka) deriving from their status as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad through the Alawite family. The Moroccan king has historically been regarded as a supreme mujtahid (a scholar with the qualification to undertake independent reasoning on legal matters), and, even today, carries the title amīr al-muʾminīn (Commander of the Faithful). As such, the Moroccan monarchy holds the authority to decide aspects of Islamic law and Qurʾanic exegesis, 29 as well as political issues. Also in contrast to Jordan, Morocco is far more theologically diverse. Entelis has suggested a three-fold categorisation of Islamic expression in Morocco: saintly, scripturalist, and social. 30 While the Sufi, or saintly, Islamic tradition is said to have been of greater Jillian Schwedler, ‘Occupied Maan. Jordan’s Closed Military Zone’, Middle East Reasearch and Information Project (MERIP), (December 3, 2002), http://www.merip.org/mero/mero120302. 28 Curtis R. Ryan, ‘“Jordan first”: Jordan’s inter-Arab relations and foreign policy under King Abdullah II’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 26/3 (2004), p. 55. 29 Gudrun Krämer, ‘Good Counsel to the King’, p. 275. 30 John P. Entelis, Culture and counterculture in Moroccan Politics, (Lanham, 1996), p. 37. 27

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relevance in Morocco’s past than it has today, 31 the so-called Maraboutic cults and their contemporary adherents represent a symbol of continuing folk culture more than they possess actual political influence. However, the relationship of master and disciple in Sufi brotherhoods and tradition, which represents a way towards the divine, has very much been applied to the relationship of king and the people in Morocco, serving as the ‘cultural foundation of Moroccan authoritarianism’. 32 Ordained with religious baraka, the king “[f]or many pious people in the countryside […] is the ‘supreme marabout’. 33 Scripturalism, according to Entelis, describes the ‘official’, or formal, as well as reformist, Islam presented by the monarchy and the ulama. It is based amongst the elites of Morocco’s urban centres, representing and upholding ‘orthodoxy’. 34 With regards to regime legitimisation, scripturalism is of importance as it constitutes the institutionalised form of Islam in the kingdom. Having established the monarchy, itself as the central religious institution, Moroccan kings divided religious scholarship 35 amongst institutions such as madrasas, mosques and Qarawiyyin University, which were brought under the control of the government and widely co-opted. 36 Both fragmentation and co-optation thus served the monarchs for two purposes: it enabled them to undermine the formation of competing religious authorities and ensured continuing support from the ulama. 37 Finally, the ‘social’, ‘populist’, or ‘political’ expression of Islam as a form of Islamic opposition is said to be of less relevance in Morocco than in other Arab countries, such as neighbouring Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, (New Haven, 1968), p. 44. 32 Abdellah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple. The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism, (Chicago, 1997). 33 John P. Entelis, Culture and counterculture in Moroccan Politics, p. 39. 34 Ibid., pp. 39–40. 35 Malika Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco. Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics, (Princeton, 2008), pp. 10–12. 36 Gudrun Krämer, ‘Good Council to the King’, p. 276. 37 Malika Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco, p. 10. 31

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Algeria. 38 Since 1962, political pluralism was allowed under a framework defined by the king, but political opposition did not arise in Islamic terms, which instead focused on cultural, social and religious issues. The religious authority and centrality of the monarchs as a symbol of national identity served the heirs’ needs. As Entelis has pointed out, ‘the revolutionary dimensions of militant Islam’ of enforcing loyalty to the umma and breaking with loyalty to the homeland (al-watan) as alien to Muslim societies, failed in Morocco. Entelis argues that: the umma-watan distinction does not apply [in Morocco] because government symbols, institutions, and practices are designed to reinforce the religious and secular legitimacy of the state with which the overwhelming majority identify. 39

The co-opting of scripturalist Islam and fencing off of Islamic activism by the Moroccan kings was accomplished with hard power instruments. Leveau has stressed that the ‘[M]orrocan monarchy, in its current form, is a historical-political construction, intended to persuade people to believe in the perenniality of its structure’. 40 The conversion of symbolic power into real power was effectively undertaken by Muhammad V in the time after independence from France and led to the ‘construction of the monarch’s image as the religious symbol of national unity’. 41 Obviously, playing the soft power card is highly dependent on hard power instruments: the institutionalisation of the religious field (a form of hard power) is essential to the project of making the king the religious symbol of national unity. In fact, Faath concludes that the religious-political institutions exclusively serve the king as executive instruments of his sectarian, political agenda. 42 Gudrun Krämer, ‘Good Council to the King’, p. 276. John P. Entelis, Culture and counterculture in Moroccan Politics, p. 42. 40 Remy Leveau, ‘The Moroccan monarchy: A Political System in Quest of a New Equilibrium’, in Middle East Monarchies, Ed. Joseph Kostiner, p. 119. 41 Remy Leveau, ‘The Moroccan monarchy’, pp. 119–123. 42 Sigrid Faath, ‘Marokkos reformorientierte Religionspolitik. Eingriffe in Tradition und Religion’, in Staatliche Religionspolitik in 38 39

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As a consequence, referring to the religious soft power repertoire of the Moroccan monarchs – and the establishment of a narrative of the interconnectedness of ‘God, the fatherland, and the king’ that reflects an irreplaceable interdependence – is of high importance with regard to the context of Islam and nationalism, too. A conceptual phenomenon labelled the ‘Muslim consensus’, 43 and unique to Morocco, plays a crucial role in the establishment of this image of irreplaceability. According to Entelis, monarchical rule ‘finds support among a broad segment of Moroccan society at both the elite and the mass levels’ since it represents ‘religious authority, state power, and charismatic personality’ at once. The Muslim consensus serves as a foundation for popular identification with the monarchy. The concept defines Morocco’s cultural identity as based on three interrelated aspects: Islam (as the country’s spiritual and social anchor), Arabism (which ‘fuses language, culture history, and nationality into an integrated whole’), and Moroccanism, as a ‘specific nationalist sentiment that focuses citizen loyalty on Morocco as state, nation, territory, and ideal’. 44 The term Muslim consensus was chosen because for a majority of Moroccans, ‘religious authority both transcends and suffuses national identity’. 45 The Moroccan kings Mohammad V, Hassan II, and Mohammad VI have managed to be intimately identified with the Muslim consensus, especially – but not solely – by making use of the monarchical narrative of religious legitimisation. In other words, all three Moroccan kings, since independence in 1956, have proven highly skilled at using religious symbols (i.e., religious soft power) to maintain the monarchy’s image as the core emblem of Moroccan national identity and the Muslim consensus. 46 Nordafrika/Nahost. Ein Instrument für modernisierende Reformen?, Ed. Faath Sigrid, (Hamburg, 2007), p. 152. 43 John P. Entelis, Culture and counterculture in Moroccan Politics, p. 11. 44 Ibid., pp. 11–12. 45 Henry Munson Jr., The House of Si Abd Allah the oral history of a Moroccan family, (New Haven, 1984), p. 49. 46 Mohamed Daadaoui, Moroccan Monarchy and the Islamist Challenge. Maintaining Makhzen Power, (New York, 2011), p. 52, 83.

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In contrast to Jordan, however, the Moroccan monarchy is eager to preserve its supreme position above ‘average’ society, as well as above political and religious elites (which are ‘understood to be separate and lower in stature than the monarchy’). 47 Similarly, it seeks to maintain its status as above reproach, as codified in the constitution. Despite the fact that the new constitution of 2011 does not describe the king as ‘sacred’ any longer, 48 he remains an irreplaceable symbol of national unity and is less present as primus inter pares than the heir of Jordan. Even though Mohammad VI has been concerned with presenting himself as a ‘touchable’ leader who is concerned with worldly matters, 49 the present Moroccan king, like his predecessors, connects the religious soft power narrative of his rule much more to the transcendent aspect of religious symbolism than his Jordanian counterparts. In fact, Moroccan kings since independence were able to create such an intimate identification of throne and national identity even against a religiously (first and foremost amongst Muslims, but also with regard to a Jewish minority) but also socially and ethno- linguistically diverse population. In short, the depth and breadth of the monarchs’ use of religious soft power is so universal, that almost every religious, social and other group of society is able to project its own specific identity onto the monarchical ruler. While sub-attributes of individual or group identification remain intact, they have, according to Entelis, limited implications on the national state, and ‘sub-cleavages are superseded by the triple bastions of civilization and identity […] which form a Muslim consensus’. 50 As a consequence, and similar to the Jordanian monarchs, the Moroccan kings have also made use of a rather inclusive and pluralistic vision of Islam as a means of stabilising their regime. This is noteworthy with regards to a diverse religious field in the 85.

47

Mohamed Daadaoui, Moroccan Monarchy and the Islamist Challenge, p.

Hanspeter Mattes, ‘Umfang und Reichweite sicherheitspolitischer Reformen in Marokko’, GIGA Working Papers, n. 248 (June, 2014), p. 11. 49 Sigrid Faath, ‘Marokkos reformorientierte Religionspolitik’, p. 147. 50 John P. Entelis, Culture and counterculture in Moroccan Politics, p. 26. 48

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first place, where the use of rituals of ‘socioreligious importance to society […] are seen as mediating tools between symbolic divisions to produce social solidarity and maintain social equilibrium’. 51 Like in Jordan, the propagation of a pluralistic and inclusive understanding of Moroccan Islam is of significant importance in times of political crisis related to Islamist terrorism. In fact, the attacks of March 16, 2003, by five suicide bombers in Casablanca, ‘radically changed the political situation in Morocco. The kingdom lost its image as a haven of peace protected […] by the commander of the faithful’. 52 In one reaction amongst others, Mohammad VI referred to ‘a rhetoric of religious authenticity’ and worked on relocating and re-centring Islam ‘inside its national frontiers and within a strictly Moroccan Islamic tradition’ 53 in order to undermine the transnational and universalistic ideology of jihadism, and to ‘re-conquer its [the regime’s] religious territory’ 54. Besides hard power measures, the monarchy also made use of its soft power means by, for example, creating a television channel named Assadissa ‘based on a commitment to true Moroccan values and the uniqueness of the Maliki faith and rite’ 55 and supporting apolitical Sufi movements to counterbalance Islamism. 56 In addition, Zeghal points out, that, amongst other faith-based reforms undertaken, measures were taken to restructure not just the ‘institutions of religious education […] but also the content of the knowledge transmitted, […] primarily by opening up to “otherness”, that is, to the plurality of other cultures and civilizations’. 57

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51

Mohamed Daadaoui, Moroccan Monarchy and the Islamist Challenge, p.

Malika Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco, p. 231. Ibid., p. 234. 54 Ibid., p. 242. 55 Sarah Touahri, ‘Assadissa religious channel still trying to gain traction in Morocco’, magharebia.com, (October 29, 2006). 56 Anouar Boukhars, Politics in Morocco Executive monarchy and enlightened authoritarianism, (London, 2011), p. 151. 57 Malika Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco, p. 250. 52 53

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What is more, in 2006 the Ministry of Religious Affairs published a Manual for Imams and Preachers wherein Moroccan Islam was specifically defined as evolving around Asharite theology, Maliki jurisprudence, and Sufism in accordance with the Sunna. Still, especially the reference to the Maliki school was portrayed as a flexible legal method, “rather than as a standard for the codifying of the law once and for all”. 58 The manual thus exemplifies the definition of Islam as a primary identity structuring code for the Moroccan nation. While overall based in Islam and in accordance with the universality of Islam, the peculiarity of Moroccan Islam is given further emphasis by its being bound to the supervision of the amir al-muʾminin, who, ideally, is the sole legitimate political and religious authority in the state.

CONCLUSION

The aim of this study was to understand the relevance of religion in constructing national identity and stability in the monarchies of Jordan and Morocco. In general, both monarchies refer to what can be called ‘religious soft power’ in order to legitimise their rule. However, while the Jordanian kings leverage lineage and functional aspects of religious legitimisation, the Moroccan soft power repertoire goes beyond these two and also includes claims of religious authority. This difference does not go without consequence with regards to the relationship of national identity and religion as put forward by the monarchs themselves. While both regimes are primarily interested in fostering and preserving the loyalty of their subjects, the Moroccan king – as a symbol for the Moroccan state and nation with religious authority – is placed above every day politics much more so than his Jordanian counterpart, even while keeping himself involved. In the case of the Jordanian kings, however, giving the impression of claiming some sort of religious authority may prove counterproductive. Therefore, the Jordanian kings Ibid., p. 253; arguing in the same direction, Sigrid Faath, ‘Marokkos reformorientierte Religionspolitik’, p. 161. 58

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present themselves as somewhat more primus inter pares than their Moroccan counterparts. The propagation a tolerant and pluralist vision of Islam by both regimes helps to further exemplify this distinction. In contrast to the Jordanian king, who points to the national project to protect Muslim and Christian Jerusalem as a mutual task for ruler and ruled, the Moroccan monarchs get involved in structuring and authoring theological discourse in much more detail, as the Manual for Imams and Preachers, with its detailed definition of Moroccan Islam, shows. In fact, one may say that the transcendental factor of religious soft power (that is, transcendental issues and eternal reasons) is much more at work in Morocco than in Jordan. Finally, in both countries, referring to religious soft power does not imply refraining from hard power measures when deemed necessary. In fact, they are often two sides of the same coin as reactions by the regimes in face of real or perceived threats by Islamist actors illustrate.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abdullah II of Jordan, ‘Remarks by His Majesty King Abdullah II at the Plenary Session of the 69th United Nations General Assembly’, (New York September 24, 2014). ——— Our last best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril, (New York, 2011). Areej Abuqudairi, ‘Jordan wages war against ISIL at home’, alJazeera, (December 7, 2014). Laurence Axelrod, ‘Tribesmen in Uniform: The Demise of the Fida’iyyun in Jordan, 1970–1971’, Muslim World, 68/1 (1978), 25–45. Alexander Bligh, The Political Legacy of King Hussein, (Brighton, 2002). William Booth and Taylor Luck, ‘To counter rise of Islamic State, Jordan imposes rules on Muslim clerics’, The Washington Post, (November 9 2014). Anouar Boukhars, Politics in Morocco Executive monarchy and enlightened authoritarianism, (London, 2011). Laurie A. Brand, ‘‘In the Beginning was the State…’: The Quest for Civil Society in Jordan’, in Civil Society in the Middle East, Ed. Norton, Richard August, (Leiden, 1995), I, 148–185.

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———, ‘Palestinians and Jordanians: A Crisis of Identity’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 24/4 (1995), 46–61. Michaelle Browers, ‘Official Islam and the Limits of Communicative Action: the paradox of the Amman Message’, Third World Quarterly, 32/5 (2011), 943–958. Mohamed Daadaoui, Moroccan Monarchy and the Islamist Challenge. Maintaining Makhzen Power, (New York, 2011). John P. Entelis, Culture and counterculture in Moroccan Politics, (Lanham, 1996). Sigrid Faath, ‘Marokkos reformorientierte Religionspolitik. Eingriffe in Tradition und Religion’, in Staatliche Religionspolitik in Nordafrika/Nahost. Ein Instrument für modernisierende Reformen? Ed. Faath Sigrid, (Hamburg, 2007), 135–174. Hellel Frisch, ‘Fuzzy nationalism: The case of Jordan’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics, 8/4 (2002), 86–103. Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia, (New Haven, 1968). Abdellah Hammoudi, Master and Disciple. The Cultural Foundations of Moroccan Authoritarianism, (Chicago, 1997). Judith Jolen, The Quest of Legitimacy. The Role of Islam in the State’s Political Discourse in Egypt and Jordan (1979–1996), (Nijmegen, 2004). Gudrun Krämer, ‘Good Counsel to the King: The Islamist opposition in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Morocco’, in Middle East Monarchies. The Challenge of Modernity, Ed. Joseph Kostiner, (Boulder, 2000), 257–287. Remy Leveau, ‘The Moroccan monarchy: A Political System in Quest of a New Equilibrium’, in Middle East Monarchies. The Challenge of Modernity, Ed. Joseph Kostiner, (Boulder, 2000), 117–130. Russell E. Lucas, Institutions and the Politics of Survival in Jordan. Domestic Responses to external Challenges, 1988–2001, (New York, 2005). Peter Mandaville, Transnational Muslim Politics Reimagining the Umma, (London, 2001).

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Hanspeter Mattes, ‘Umfang und Reichweite sicherheitspolitischer Reformen in Marokko’, GIGA Working Papers No. 248 (June 2014). Henry Munson Jr., The House of Si Abd Allah. The Oral History of a Moroccan Family, (New Haven, 1984). Norig Neveu, ‘Islamic tourism as an ideological construction: A Jordan study case’, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 8/4 (2010), 327–337. Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power. The Means to Success in World Politics. (New York, 2004). Rania of Jordan, ‘Opening speech at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit 2014’, (Abu Dhabi November 18, 2004). Curtis R. Ryan, ‘‘Jordan first’: Jordan’s inter-Arab relations and foreign policy under King Abdullah II’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 26/3 (2004), 43–62. Jillian Schwedler, ‘Occupied Maan. Jordan’s Closed Military Zone’, Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP), (December 3, 2002). Asher Susser, ‘The Jordanian Monarchy: The Hashemite Success story’, in Middle East Monarchies. The Challenge of Modernity, Ed. Joseph Kostiner, (Boulder, 2000), 87–115. Jonas Teichgreeber, Das hašimitische Herrschaftssystem unter König ʿAbdallah II, (Berlin, 2013). Sarah Touahri, ‘Assadissa religious channel still trying to gain traction in Morocco’, magharebia.com, (October 29, 2006). Malika Zeghal, Islamism in Morocco. Religion, Authoritarianism, and Electoral Politics, (Princeton, 2008).

4. SAUDI NATIONAL IDENTITY: HISTORICAL AND IDEATIONAL DIMENSIONS ELENA MAESTRI 1 INTRODUCTION

This chapter will focus on the main historical and ideational dimensions characterizing the Saudi State in its evolution, while seeking to shed light on the special relationship between religion, ‘national’ identity and ‘nationalism’ in this country. The role of religion (the Wahhabi version of Islam) in forging Saudi Arabia as a state (dawla) certainly comes to the fore within the unification process (tawahhud) under the leadership of the al-Saud. No doubt, elements of Arabian tribal political culture and structures intertwine with Islam within Saudi statehood. Since the proto-states of the 18th and 19th centuries, they contributed to the state-building process and to the emergence of some cohesion forces intermingling with the religious factor and impacting on the consolidation of al-watan (the homeland/fatherland), as ‘the nation’. After the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Kingdom witnessed more rigid interpretation of Wahhabism on the one hand and rising influence of transnational Islamist forces on the other, from the Dr. Elena Maestri is a Tenured Researcher and Adjunct Professor of History and Institutions of the Muslim World within the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (UCSC) of Milan (Italy). 1

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Muslim Brotherhood to the opposition Salafiyya. 2 That was certainly a major challenge to the same concept of al-watan, after the declining tide of pan-Arabism. The most conservative elements were entrenched in institutions, which ended up marking a regressive change in Saudi society that inevitably affected women and non-Wahhabi Arab religious communities, namely the Shi‘a. Such communities were spurred to invoke their authentic Arab identity (al-ʿuruba) within a lively debate on ‘the homeland’ and ‘citizenship’. 3 Such a debate has been developing throughout the years and continues to. Against this backdrop, rising political willingness to oppose transnational Islamist forces at the leadership level has been leading to an expanding ‘flexible approach’ in the official interpretation of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s thought, despite the persisting clout of the most conservative forces. Two authentic, equivalent terms for ‘nationalism’ in Arabic are al-qawmiyya and al-wataniyya, but only the latter can be applied to describe ‘nationalism’ in Saudi Arabia, where it first emerges as a combination of Arabian identity and puritan Islamic thought rooted in a specific tribal structure. It was conceived as a pillar of the state and major legitimiser of the authority and power of the alSaud in the territory. A process of unification (tawahhud) in three different historical phases developed within the dimension of this peculiar ‘territorial nationalism’, which inevitably ended up clashing The Salafiyya (from salaf, ancestors) is a composite movement, of which Wahhabism is only one expression. It is deeply linked to the traditional knowledge and consciousness of early Islam and its original precepts. The Salafiyya can be defined in Western terms as a strict school of jurisprudence, which has had – and continues to enjoy – a significant following and impact throughout most of the Islamic world. 3 On citizenship in Saudi Arabia, the following authors and titles are quite significant: Sa’id Harib, Al-Khalij bayna al-tabaʾiyya wa al-muwatana [The Gulf between the ‘condition of those who follow and recognize an authority’ and citizenship], Fouad Ibrahim, Al-muwatana fi mujtamaʿ taʿaddudi: halat al-saʿudiyya [Citizenship in a pluralistic society: the case of Saudi Arabia], Yusif Makki, Al-muwatana wa al-wahda al-wataniyya [Citizenship and national unity], Qadaia al-khalij [Gulf issues]: http://gulf issues.net/. 2

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with the ‘revolutionary’, pan-Arabist nationalism (al-qawmiyya). Both pan-Arabism and political Islam have, in reality, been hampering state-centric behaviour, while aiming to create transnational and supra-state identities. Saudi nationalism, on the contrary, developed as an Islamic, state-centred ideology founded on a series of connections between the authority, Islam and the local environment. If, on the one hand, nationalism in the Kingdom is first and foremost identified with the Saudi-Wahhabi state project, on the other, it can also be seen as an expression of growing identity consciousness among some Saudi citizens (muwatinun), who tend to oppose the more and more aggressive transnational ideologies, threatening the same existence of Saudi Arabia as a state, by developing a discourse on shared Islamic-Arabian values, tradition and conventions, habits and a ‘collective memory’. They are not necessarily in line with the government’s position, but they contribute to an interesting process of re-negotiation of the Saudi identity, in its multidimensional and polycentric character. These ‘nationalists’, in a way, permit the re-discovery of pluralism in the country, while articulating both growing awareness on the crucial role of the kingdom at the regional and global level, and dissatisfaction with the slow pace of reforms at the domestic political level. Within this framework, the unprecedentedly pro-active Saudi stance in the Arab world since 2011 seems to be affected by new variables, within a more and more global and globalised world, of which the Muslim umma (believers’ community/nation) is a major and crucial component. The special responsibility of the kingdom in this direction comes to the fore and it inevitably intertwines with its renewed ‘national narrative’.

HISTORICAL AND IDEATIONAL DIMENSIONS IN THE SAUDI STATE

The peculiar structural aspects characterising the Saudi political system refer both to an Arabian tribal political culture, which the Kingdom widely shares with the other founding members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and to a precise historical evolution, which, on the contrary, makes it a quite exceptional case in the Arab world. The Islamic-tribal paradigm, with its typical traditional structural forms of power, and the superimposed might

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of the modern bureaucratic apparatus, contributed to shape political developments and shifts toward modernity in the country since the second half of last century. Saudis are generally quite aware of the uniqueness of their history, of their pattern of society, statehood and statecraft, in which Islam, tribalism, tradition, and most recently, a modern bureaucratic system have been merging, resulting in a well-defined political set-up. The promotion of a first successful development phase in the last century, after the oil-boom in the 1970s, was largely the result of the flexibility of the system, in spite of its weaknesses and fragilities. Nowadays, informal original tribal institutions and values live on and they cannot be ignored, while civil society institutions remain quite weak. The establishment of the contemporary Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 by Abdulaziz al-Saud cannot be decoupled from the two previous Saudi-Wahhabi states (1747–1818, 1824–1891). Saudi statehood is neither the result of anti-colonial struggles, nor of a post-colonial control of the territory and governance. The country never experienced the emergence of a secular nationalist movement, but some deep historical and ideological dimensions have been affecting and shaping the state-building process and the consolidation of al-watan (the ‘homeland’), within an original mixture of tribal, community, regional and sectarian identities. Fragmentation was prevailing and, in a way, it was addressed by the spread of a Saudi-Wahhabi-Islamic-Arab nationalism (Al-Rasheed 2013). Thus, ‘Saudi nationalism’ is founded on the acceptance and recognition of the result of a unification process (tawahhud) under the leadership of the al-Saud, within a religious-political alliance agreed in Najd between Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a local qadi (judge). The chief Najdi chronicles of that period, from Raudat al-afkar by Ibn Ghannam, to al-Akhbar alnajdiyya by Fakhiri, and ʿUnwan al-majd fi taʾrikh Najd by Ibn Bishr, allow for quite a precise historical reconstruction of events. 4 The G. S. Rentz, The Birth of the Islamic Reform Movement in Saudi Arabia. Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703/4–1792) and the Beginnings of Unitarian Empire in Arabia, (London, 2004). 4

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religious-military-administrative basis that developed since then is still at the core of the third Saudi State. After consolidating local authority in Najd, the Saudi-Wahhabi initiative enlarged towards the wealthiest regions of Arabia at that time, from al-Hasa and al-Qatif, part of the historical region of alBahrain, 5 to the Hejaz. The increased resources were crucial in strengthening authority and power. In local history, the projection of centralized power beyond Najd, towards the east and the west of the Peninsula, was strictly related to the importance of controlling and securitising caravans and pilgrims’ routes from the Gulf to the Red Sea coasts, and more specifically to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina. Arabic chronicles, when speaking about pre-Wahhabi Najd, put emphasis on the crucial links between the prosperity of business revolving around the Islamic pilgrimage (hajj) and the political-military ability to guarantee safety along the ancient routes crossing the tribal territories (dirat) of central Arabia. 6 The affluence of thousands of pilgrims, giving offerings and spending while travelling across Arabia to the Hejaz, could not be conceived without the existence of a strong authority able to safeguard commercial interests, which can also explain the pivotal support of the merchants to the establishment of the Saudi-Wahhabi State since the 18th century. At the beginning of the 20th century, a renewed agreement between an intelligent and determined military chief like Abdulaziz and the ʿulama of the Al al-Shaykh family (the descendants of shaykh Ibn Abd al-Wahhab) confirmed the original Saudi state model: din wa dawla (religion and state). This led to the expansion of the Hanbali madhhab, the most conservative school of Islamic jurisprudence. Abdulaziz progressively acquired the unified political domain through well-coordinated military campaigns, with the international backing and benevolence of Great Britain. Thus, a particularly puritan Islamic belief-system, as an expression of The historical region of al-Bahrayn in classical Arabic sources includes present eastern Saudi Arabia, in addition to the nearby archipelago, the present State of Bahrain. 6 S. Al-Sakhawi, Al-dawʾ al-lamiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tasiʿ, (Cairo, 1353 AH). 5

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Salafiyya, rooted in the local tradition of Najdi ahl al-qalam (scholars), took on a dynamic form. The aggressiveness of the Bedouins trained and gathered in the fearful Ikhwan (Brothers) military force was channelled towards a well-defined political project. 7 Authority was strengthened from within through Islam, and a state structure was built into a religious system, into a series of crucial tribal loyalties and, last but not least, into a supportive commercial establishment, the rich merchant class. The latter was much larger in the Hejaz than anywhere else in the state; it was the well-structured pivotal component of a quite complex corporate system, strictly connected to the prosperous business activities revolving first of all around the hajj and, secondly, around the Muslims’ ‘visit’ (ʿumra) to the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. The fact that the most important merchant families, in spite of the cultural distinctiveness of the Hejaz, came to terms with the new authority rather soon after the expulsion of the Hashemites in 1925 8 is certainly related to the pro-business and pragmatic attitude they perceived in the new leadership. Either originally Hejazi or integrated into the Hejaz, they indirectly concurred to projecting the Saudi state towards a more prominent role in the Muslim world, as they had networks of contacts with Arab and Muslim countries, tribes and families near and far away, from Yemen to Syria, from Morocco to Central Asia and to the Far East. The newly established state was thus quite different from most Gulf Arab shaykhdoms at the time and it was completely different from Arab states carrying the weight of colonisation in the Mashreq and in the Maghreb. It had its roots in the two previous Saudi-Wahhabi states, where al-muqawama (resistance) had been conceived and elaborated as a political-military initiative only against Turkish-Egyptian troops, not against any European power. The first Saudi-Wahhabi States can be compared in a way only with the Omani State (1744–) and the Qasimi State centred around Sharjah and Ra’s al-Khaimah at its height (c.1750–1860s); all of T. Niblock, Saudi Arabia. Power, Legitimacy and Survival, (London, New York, 2006), p. 31. 8 A. Al-ʿUthaymin, Storia dell’Arabia Saudita, (Palermo, 2001), p. 249. 7

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them certainly shared some traits beyond proto-statehood, in terms of their economic, military, political and demographic resources. 9 The Basic Rule of Government, adopted by royal decree of King Fahd in 1992, rigorously confirms the original statehood paradigm, as it declares ‘Citizens [muwatinun] are to pledge allegiance to the King in accordance with the holy Koran and the tradition of the Prophet…’ (Nizam al-asasi li-l-hukm 1992, art. 6). The contractual basis of the monarchy in the article is expressed by the term bayʿa, literally meaning ‘making a contract’. 10 The need to promote internal cohesion was then perceived as an urgent issue and the Provinces’ Statute (Nizam al-manatiq), promulgated in the same year, was aimed mainly to enhance regional integration. 11 The decision of King Abdullah in 2012 to transfer the government to Jeddah six months a year has re-confirmed a similar effort by the leadership in the same direction. Resilience and resistance of some tribal political mechanisms intertwine in this case with a clear political willingness to officially emphasise the dual core of the Saudi national identity: Najd, the cradle of the original SaudiWahhabi State, and Hijaz, the cradle of Islam. Religion is thus further ‘nationalised’, while official symbols and narratives intermingle subtly with a wider integrated territorial dimension. A substantially positive interrelationship between the political/religious sphere on the one hand, and the expanding economic/commercial urban sphere, on the other, has always been an important determinant in the consolidation of the bases of support within Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the development of a strong ‘national bourgeoisie’ during the 20th century represents a very interesting phenomenon within this framework. Top-down initiatives through school programs and the media, a modern J. Onley, S. Khalaf, ‘Shaikhly Authority in the Pre-Oil Gulf: An Historical-Anthropological Study’, History and Anthropology, 17/3 (September 2006), p. 191. 10 E. Maestri, La regione del Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Sviluppo e sicurezza umana in Arabia, (Milano, 2009), p. 112. 11 G. Luciani, ‘From Private Sector to National Bourgeoisie: Saudi Arabian Business’, in Saudi Arabia in the Balance, Eds. P. Aarts, G. Nonneman, (London, 2005), p. 144. 9

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administration, including rising numbers of Saudi graduates of Western universities, and physical mobility from one region to the other are no less important factors, leading to the emergence of some unprecedented integration forces. In this direction, one cannot neglect the fact that currently many urban Saudis, from different regions, in their thirties and forties, more clearly express than the older generations a shared sense of identity that is both territorialised and rooted in a series of Arabian-Islamic values, with the potential to bridge the differences. Thus, Mecca and Medina are seen as a fundamental core of al-watan, within a dimension referring to an evolving thought and reality. 12 As for the Bedouins, the end of their nomadic lifestyle, which had started in the first half of the 20th century with some success, continued throughout the 1960s and the 1970s under the pressure of rapid urbanisation first, followed later by planning specifically addressed both at urban and rural areas. Most Bedu communities abandoned their nomadic habits, while a state-centralisation process sharply reduced local and tribal autonomy, with a clear impact up to the present. 13 Against this backdrop, it is clear that we are dealing with a cultural context that – today – is organised primarily on an urban basis, where, nonetheless, specific traditional social, economic and institutional conditions and values survive and continue to affect the life-styles and mentality of the people. We are dealing with a ‘rational order’, which the reforms introduced by modernity and its new bureaucratic order is speeding up. The political power presupposes the existence of the ‘city’, and yet the territory surrounding the urban space is marked both by the ‘rural dimension’ and by the last remnants of the ‘nomadic dimension’. Rural Suadi Arabia was deeply affected, first, by king Abdulaziz’s policy of establishing settlements (the so called hijar) for the nomadic Bedouins and, second, since the 1970s, by development Thanks to Faisal Al-Dawood (diplomat) in discussion with the author, Riyadh, November 2014. 13 M. Al Hammad, ‘An Overview of Urban Development Process’, in Urban Development in Saudi Arabia. Challenges and Opportunities, Eds. S. Al Hathloul, N. Edadan, (Riyadh, 1999), p. 79. 12

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projects reaching out to the villagers as well, and often pushing them towards old and new towns and cities. The most common ‘rural to urban movement’ was accompanied by the significant transformation ‘from rural nomad to rural sedentary’, a process in which the complexity of rural administration in the Kingdom and the role of the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs in instituting integrated rural community development programs since 1983 came to the fore, 14 along with the roles of the Ministries of Interior and the National Guard. Although the urbanisation rate has been growing steadily, reaching 82.3% in the country (AHDR 2012), only the combination and interaction of the various dimensions, their individual systems and their administration can allow us to depict a realistic picture of all the internal dynamics, affecting balances and imbalances in the country. The first important phase of development and modernisation, started after the first oil boom in the 1970s, certainly contributed to the emergence of some important common denominators in the country, but it is also at the origin of that tension between tradition and modernity, which has been leading society to growing polarisation. The massive and uncontrolled growth of bureaucracy, no longer accessible to most Saudi youth, and rising unemployment are major problems, liable to affect the positive interrelationship between the political-religious sphere and the business community. At one and the same time, tribal balances seem to be re-shaped through the counterweight to the army (the National Guard), which contributed substantially to reformulating and formalizing relations between the main religious-political forces and the great tribes of Bedouin tradition and origin. 15 The recent transformation of the National Guard into a ministry, in fact, is certainly a very significant step aimed at renewing old loyalties and delicate O. Al-Rawaf, Policies and Programs of Rural Development in Saudi Arabia: A Presentation and Evaluation, (Riyadh, 1980). 15 J. Buchan, ‘Secular and Religious Opposition in Saudi Arabia’, in State, Society and Economy in Saudi Arabia, Ed. T. Niblock, (London, 1982), p. 109. 14

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balances at this critical stage of transition. 16 Avoiding a breakdown in trust between government and citizens becomes a major challenge for the leadership.

LOOKING FOR A BALANCE BETWEEN POSTTRADITIONALISM AND MODERNITY: THE ‘NATIONAL NARRATIVE’

The Saudi state, as both the cradle of Wahhabism and in its role of Custodianship of the Two Holy Sites, has most recently been developing a flexible approach to the al-islah (reform) thought of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Another no less significant step taken by this political orientation is the tangible interest in ijtihad, or the effort of religious scholars to interpret the Qur’an and the Sunna by using reason and logic, without relying exclusively on the traditional official school of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). Both the Saudi National Declaration for Reform presented to the government in February 2011 by a group of intellectuals appealing for ‘the adoption of a comprehensive reform programme by the State and society’ and the political efforts of King Abdullah, trying painstakingly to find a balance between post-traditionalism and modernisation at the political and social levels, can be seen in line with this orientation. The leadership mobilised resources and assets, while subordinating reforms in the political and judicial systems to economic, cultural and educational reforms. If, on the one hand, we cannot ignore that the top-down political initiatives taken to date fall short of the most reform-minded expectations in the kingdom, most Saudi Islamo-liberal reformists seem to agree that substantive evolution of the political, judicial and social systems cannot be pursued by imitating the West, and that looking for ‘a Saudi way’ is not so immediate. Freedom of thought and expression, identity formation, political activism and social networking are at the centre of an open debate among the Saudi “Saudi Prince to Head National Guard Ministry”: http://www.al jazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/05/201352716220832101.html (accessed on 27/05/2013). 16

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intellectual élite, who are asking that they be incorporated into an educational system that does not put them in conflict with Islamic principles. That is a complex reality, in which the sustainability of the state cannot be linked only to the accountability of political power and the balance of power within the royal family; it is a much more comprehensive challenge in the Saudi context. The ‘Islam factor’ will continue to play a crucial role in a still slow and yet irreversible process of change. Within this process, a discourse on ‘the nation’, ‘citizenship’, ‘nationality’ and ‘nationalism’ has been developing, within an environment which, while still skipping participation and protest, seems to open slightly as far as expression is concerned, moving away from the notion that the term ‘national’ (muwatin) simply refers to ‘an individual as descendant of the tribal/national society’, and arguing that citizens’ belonging to the fatherland (muwatana) should not be limited to ‘passport citizenship’ (jinsiyya). These are certainly important aspects of a lively debate, articulating new awareness of some rights and responsibilities of the citizenry. In the background, there is the Saudi Arabian Nationality Statute, going back to the 1960s, and asserting that ‘Saudis are those who follow and recognize the authority of the government of His Majesty the King, according to the rules…They are: (a) those who had followed and recognized the Ottoman authority in 1332 AH (year 1914 AD) among the inhabitants of the original territories of Saudi Arabia, (b) Ottoman subjects born on territories of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1332 AH (year 1914 AD), who maintained their residence on those territories until 22/3/1345 AH, and did not get any foreign nationality before that date, (c) those who were not subjects of the Ottomans and were residents on the territories of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1332 AH (1914 AD), while maintaining their residence on these territories until 22/3/1345 AH, and without getting any foreign nationality before that date’ (Nizam al-jinsiyya al-ʿarabiyya al-saʿudiyya: 1384 AH, art. 3–4). Within this framework, among the most active participants in recent debates, on the one hand, are the Shi‘a, under the umbrella of their proclaimed al-ʾasala al-shiʿiyya al-ʿarabiyya (Arab Shi‘a authenticity) (Aarts 2011; Al-Rasheed 1998), and on the other, there are women, who, under the umbrella of ‘Saudi nationalism’, can be either Islamic activists (the majority) with strong emphasis

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on the religious dimension of the kingdom, or ‘liberals’/Islamoliberals (the minority) with strong commitment to cultural development and acculturation against indoctrination (Al Rasheed 2013). Al-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya (Arab nationalism), a secular panArabist movement originating in the Levant, found only limited support in the Kingdom during the last century and only among those few critics of the regime, often supported by Iraq and Syria, who accepted the ideology of pan-Arabism as the doctrine of Arab political unity. 17 No doubt al-wataniyya al-saʿudiyya (Saudi nationalism), rigorously anchored in Islam, has been developing also within a series of connections between the state, the territory and the local Arabian culture, tradition and historical heritage. Therefore, it has been assuming different nuances throughout the years. It is first and foremost identified with the Saudi-Wahhabi state project, which refers to the Wahhabi-Salafi variant of Islam, but it can also become expressed in the growing identity shared by those Saudi citizens (muwatinuun) who, despite differing in their ideological/religious background and coming from different regions, recognize their loyalty to the ‘homeland’, in opposition to transnational ideologies threatening the existence of Saudi Arabia as a state. They can dissent from the government’s position on relevant issues, but they contribute to an interesting process of renegotiation of the Saudi identity, in its multidimensional and polycentric character. Within the Salafiyya there are certainly many enemies of a ‘re-thought national vision’, but there are also those who advocate apolitical Islam, such as Rabi’ ibn Hadi al-Madkhali, whose thought in the early 1990s was instrumental to the government as ideological counterweight to the mixed SalafiMuslim Brotherhood reformist movement, known as Sahwa, or Awakening. 18 A. Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair, (Princeton, 2003), p. 11. 18 T. Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979, (Cambridge, 2010), p. 249; S. Lacroix, Awakening Islam: A History of Islamism in Saudi Arabia, (Cambridge Mass., 2010). 17

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In its evolution, the ‘national narrative’ seems to contribute both to the official attempt to depoliticize Islamism and to an internal debate on ‘identity awareness’ and pluralism in the Kingdom, fostered by regional, cultural and religious distinctiveness, which still needs to be re-evaluated thoroughly as a central component to a re-negotiated ‘national identity consciousness’. Against this backdrop, a ‘re-thought Saudi nationalism’ can certainly represent a by-product of social development in the country; a preliminary step towards a renegotiation of the contract between the monarchy and the citizenry. However, it can also turn out to be an extraordinary tool used by the regime to consolidate power and postpone real changes. Contradictions within ‘key concepts of the belief system’ often allowed the leadership to adapt ‘the patterns of meaning featured in the established ideology’ to changing historical circumstances 19 and the present situation might not differ. If some analysts see the traditional alliance between rulers and clerics as breaking down in a way, 20 the possible agency of civil society is still quite slow to crystallise. All of that does not seem to preclude, anyway, some interesting evolving trends in a process of redefining Saudi identity against radical extremist forces. The public discourse on Saudi citizenship and ‘the nation’, either conceived within the state or within intellectual circles, although competing on some aspects, share a common position against the presence and impact of transnational ʿulama networks and the threat of these networks to the ‘nation-state’. If one can agree with those arguing that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia will not probably move beyond the confines of ‘liberalized autocracy’ in the short to medium term, no doubt society is more and more bound to shape state policies within an increasingly multifaceted relationship with the state. The state seems to be more prone to renew alliances with those social components, whose activism can be more easily channelled towards state-controlled objectives, under S. Altorki, Women in Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior Among the Elite, (New York, 1986), p. 150. 20 C. Montagu, ‘Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector in Saudi Arabia’, The Middle East Journal, 64/1 (2010), p. 72. 19

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the umbrella of a ‘re-constructed Saudi identity’ mainly aimed at opposing political Islam and transnational ideologies and forces posing a direct threat to the ‘nation state’. The Shi‘a and women, within this perspective, have been assuming a quite dynamic role, consolidated by the National Dialogue, as it has been developing within the King Abdulaziz Center for the National Dialogue (KACND) in the last few years. The rift between the transnational Islamist forces on the one hand and the national Islamo-liberal forces on the other has become more threatening to internal security, while nourishing a sort of obsession and concern of some authorities, social scientists and educators (both males and females) on the issue of identity and the need to address the identity crisis that Saudi youth are often facing (Al-Fassi 2010). Within the National Dialogue, some leading Saudi intellectuals have been insisting on the importance of acculturation against indoctrination, well aware that this process is liable to be more successful than building a national identity in a country where the illusion of a Saudi particularity (al-saʿudiyya) is still used as a tool for cultural racism and hinders more inclusiveness in social development. On the eve of 2011 events, this ideological conflict was developing within the state and society at several levels, including the al-Saud, among whom king Abdullah’s supporters were against late prince Nayif’s hard-line Salafi followers and the Council of Senior ʿUlama, where both moderate and ultra-conservative scholars expressed conflicting positions. The new media have been contributing to enhanced polarization in society as well. Twitter is highly popular with Saudis and it has stirred open debate on subjects ranging from religion to politics in a country where such topics had been considered at best taboo and often illegal. A very divided Saudi ‘public’ has been developing between the virtual and the real dimensions, while the discourse on consolidation of a shared identity risks withering, without a more cohesive political line on the part of the state (Al-Rasheed 2013). A question arises: at this delicate juncture, is the state, under the threat of transnational Islamists, more willing to develop a clear strategy to address the existing crises of identity and contribute effectively to a re-thinking process of ‘Saudi nationalism’? Internal dynamics and balances are certainly playing a major role. Identity reconstruction celebrated in artificial environments, such as AlJanadriyya, the Annual Cultural Heritage Festival, is not enough to

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confront present challenges, and it can become complete a failure if it is paralleled by the ongoing destruction of early Islamic sites, as argued by some Saudi scholars, who simultaneously link their wataniyya with reviving awareness of the past and of regional distinctiveness. In light of the acquired expertise in religious tourism management and of the existing challenges in terms of human resources development and employment, the concept of cultural tourism has been emerging most recently in debates among experts and government officials. These debates, nourished by some critical voices complaining of the ‘destruction of Islamic heritage’ in the holy sites in the name of mega projects inspired by the ‘Dubai urban model’, mainly refer to the urgent need to regain viable urban and rural environments through renovation and revitalization projects that contribute to sustainability, and are against the orientation to destroy and rebuild. Such awareness, however, can also be seen as an interesting component of a renewed discourse on the Islamic roots of al-watan in the light of regional distinctiveness. If this trend is rising among the Saudi cultural elite, the institutional and government support in this direction is often considered too weak. The tallest clock tower in Mecca, Abraj al-Bait, rising like Big Ben in the heart of the Muslim world and towering 600 metres over the Al-Haram Mosque, is emblematic of the frenzied building boom. All that has spared neither the house of Khadija, the first wife of Prophet Muhammad, which was razed to make way for public lavatories, nor the house of Abu Bakr, destroyed to build a Hilton hotel on the site. These are just examples in a long series. ‘It is truly indescribable’, says Sami Angawi, architect and founder of the Jeddah-based Hajj Research Centre, who studied and documented many historic buildings in the Hejaz 21. Bulldozing needs to stop before a serious planning effort is initiated in urban areas, and yet all that needs to be supported by an awakening process of civil society too. As expressed by Sami Saleh Nawar, General Director for Culture and Tourism at the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs, it is very Oliver Wainwright, ‘Mecca’s mega architecture casts shadow over hajj’, The Guardian (23 October 2012). 21

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frustrating to perceive how great the indifference is regarding preservation among most Saudis, and among owners of historical houses in particular. 22 There are people arguing that reviving history is not a crucial component in building a ‘national identity’, and yet it is impossible to ignore those voices – still few in the kingdom and yet very determined – who claim the pivotal role of historical awareness as a major medium to create and consolidate the link between religion and love of al-watan. This is certainly a crucial aspect emphasised also by the Saudi Shi‘a Hassan al-Saffar in his booklet al-watan wa almuwatana: huquq wa al-wajibat (Nation and nationality: rights and duties), in which he identifies three circles of identity affecting the Saudi national (muwatin): the Muslim world (umma), the homeland (watan) and their villages and/or towns (watan ʿurfi). These three dimensions are not seen in contradiction with one another but as complementary. 23 Against this backdrop, in the Kingdom the renewed discourse on al-wahda al-wataniyya (national unity) among intellectuals of different regions and religious groups focuses on re-evaluation of pluralism (taʿaddudiyya) in the country (a value as opposed to a disrupting force) in a process of re-affirmation of loyalty to the state; as final guarantor of security and stability. After a significant rapprochement between the state and the Shi‘a, started in the 1990s, the years between 2009 and 2013 were very critical, due to events in Iraq and Bahrain, but 2014 witnessed significant changes in the leadership’s attitudes, attesting willingness to shift legitimacy to new levels and to strengthen ‘Saudi nationalism’ in a more comprehensive and restructured shape, by co-opting more variegated forces. Thanks to Sami Saleh Nawar in discussion with the author, Jeddah, March 2009. This topic was elaborated by the author in a paper on “Cultural Events and Spaces within a Development Strategy towards a Knowledge-based Society and Economy” presented at the international conference Saudi Economy: Challenges and Ambitions, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah (Saudi Arabia), 7–9 May 2012. 23 L. Louer, Transnational Shia Politics. Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf, (London, 2008), p. 234. 22

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Within the reformist national discourse some voices stand out, such as the moderate Shi‘a, like al-Saffar, who, after the 2014 events (most notably the strong reaction of the government to the terrorist attack against some Shi‘a in al-Hasa in November 2014) are liable to become very ‘useful allies’ within a rising convergence of interests against sectarianism (taʾifiyya). National divisions and communities’ isolation that the latter entails were indicated by alSaffar as major threats to al-watan on several occasions in the recent past, 24 and current threats posed by internal fanaticism to the system certainly make the ‘nationalist’ Shiites ‘partners in the homeland’, quoting the title of the petition that 450 Shi‘a notables, clerics and activists from al-Hasa addressed to the Crown Prince in 2003. Among other significant voices, one cannot neglect the Saudi ‘female world’ (al-ʿalam al-nisaʾi), which, despite some internal fractures, is emerging as another relevant component within a reconsidered ‘nationalism’. ‘Liberal’ voices are challenged by the overwhelming majority of religious nationalist women, advocating strong opposition to a Westernization process liable to destroy the religious pillars of ‘the nation’, in their eyes. They can conform to the state’s official positions or criticize them, as they think that more efforts are needed against Western influences and the ‘liberals’, in order to contain corrupting elements in Saudi society. Against this backdrop, both ‘liberal nationalist’ women and ‘Islamic nationalist’ women emerge as loyal defenders of the ‘nation’ in a state that can easily exploit the existing divisions and mobilise one group or the other, according to its internal and external interests. 25 The fact that education in the Kingdom opened a legitimate public space for women, and gave them a more dynamic role within educational institutions at all levels, further strengthened interconnections between the ‘female world’ and the state within educational reforms plans. Such plans are aimed at instilling in R. Meijer, J. Wagemakers, ‘The Struggle for Citizenship of the Shiites of Saudi Arabia’, in The Dynamics of Sunni-Shia Relationships: Doctrine, Transnationalism, Intellectuals and the Media, Eds. B. Marechal, S. Zemni, (London, 2013), p. 124. 25 M. Al Rasheed, A Most Masculine State. Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia, (New York, 2013), p. 278. 24

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students values of Islam and of Saudi society, as never happened in previous decades, when most teachers were recruited among nonnationals, mainly Egyptians. This is liable to have an impact on the national identity and the development of the youngest generations’ sense of citizenship, as female teachers become role models for students within a collective process reaching out to families and society at large. Not surprisingly, in the last few years the rising involvement of Saudi women as teachers even in the most remote rural areas of the country has affected the spread of a, more or less imagined, ‘Saudi identity’ among children, from primary school onward and under the pressure of curricula reforms. For instance, the terms Allah and watan tend to recur both regularly and jointly, as re-confirmed pillars of the promotion of a community partnership in that renewed educational process, which Saudi Arabia needs as a ‘modern Islamic-Arab State’ and a more active global actor. No doubt, developing a child with a stronger sense of identity and with pride in local traditions, in Arabic language and in Islamic beliefs is just an aspect of a more comprehensive, reformed educational process that needs to be founded more seriously also on developing creativity, curiosity and scientific, independent thinking among children, as future citizens of a ‘nation’ with a constructive role in the Muslim and global world. Despite some progressive views, nationalists, in all their components, are de facto key-supporters of the government, as they are protected by it in one way or another. Such a link obviously results in a state-centred nationalism, in which the active role of the citizens is still largely contained and strictly controlled by top-down initiatives. All of that, however, has not precluded some positive and fruitful partnerships in efforts aimed at re-shaping Saudi society against extremist transnational Islamist views, both Sunni and Shi‘a, and the most reactionary Islamic and tribal forces in the country. The National Dialogue (al-hiwar al watani) launched in 2003 by Crown Prince Abdullah, is a very interesting case in this direction: the various sessions throughout the years tackled pivotal issues for the future of the kingdom, from national unity, to extremism, women, the youth, dialogue with ‘the other’, education and

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employment. 26 Following the petition addressed to Abdullah in 2003 by a group of reformers on ‘A Present and Future Vision of the Kingdom’, which insisted on the need to recognize intellectual, regional and sectarian diversity in the country, National Dialogues have involved an elite with different ideological and religious backgrounds in a significant way, and yet all the recommendations to promote citizenship values against sectarianism and seclusion have largely remained on paper throughout the last few years. It is true that the Ministry of Information launched some unprecedented media campaigns against extremism and discrimination on sectarian, regional and tribal bases, but some voices nonetheless emphasize the importance of establishing a permanent national institution aimed at promoting an integrated national identity. Therefore, in this vision, concrete changes cannot be decoupled from more important initiatives affecting the legal and social system, in order to create solid bases for formal recognition of pluralism and diversity in the ‘nation’. 27 It is certainly a very complex and difficult process. Its outcome cannot be predicted, and yet a new Saudi strategy within the present Middle Eastern disorder cannot but start from the domestic development of a coherent political project to promote such an integrated ‘national identity’. Present uncertainties lead to pressing questions within the Saudi national discourse, in the light of the growing responsibilities of the Kingdom in the Muslim and Arab world: Is there a well-defined strategy to move Saudis forward in this shifting unsteady global order? Can they come up with better plans to stop fanaticism and terrorism? How can Saudi Arabia help the majority of Arabs who desire peace and stability to implement a middle path that is crucial to a better future for the whole region? Looking for a balance between post-traditionalism and modernity in order to face present-day challenges is an uneasy process for the leadership, and one that cannot ignore rising polarisation between the most conservative state-centred forces, the anti-state Islamist forces and all those pragmatic variegated See: http://www.kacnd.org. J. Alshayeb, Governance of Sectarian Diversity in Saudi Arabia, Arab Reform Initiative, February 2013. 26 27

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forces, emerging in the ever-divided Saudi society, which, despite their differences, advocate for reforms ‘within the national system’. Education, dialogue and the preservation of al-watan from internal violence emerge as essential clues, within a perspective trying to mix national-Islamic and liberal elements, including amongst varied groups Sunni and Shi‘a, men and women. The petition addressed to King Abdullah in April 2011, al-iʿlan al-watani li-l-islah (National Declaration for Reform) represents well such a perspective and it demands both the evolution towards a constitutional monarchy and a federal system, which respects the pluralism of Saudi Arabia. 28 Its tone is certainly very different from the petition nahwa dawlat al-huquq wa al-muʾassasat (Towards a State of Rights and Institutions). The latter called for an elected legislature too, but it founded its discourse on rights and institutions within a Salafi Islamist perspective, inherently in contradiction with forces interested in enhanced inclusiveness and dialogue in the ‘nation’. Thus, both petitions of 2011 represented a clear echo of the demands for political reform throughout the Arab world, 29 but only one was actually conceived as watani (national). Within a more and more complex social environment, deeply marked by internal inconsistencies and ambiguities, the voices of intellectuals like Abdulaziz Othman Altuwaijri, Muhammad Shams al-Din Khojah, Khaled Muhammed al-Mughamisi, Hatoon al-Fassi, just to mention a few, emphasize the importance of dialogue at this delicate juncture. The effects of globalization, modernity and widespread Islamist ideologies seriously confront the growth of a ‘national identity’ founded on a re-discovered or re-imagined pluralistic ‘cultural core’ to be enhanced so religious and social values can intertwine and link the past and the future of Saudi people within a constructive cultural framework and against disruptive forces. 30 And yet, re-launching the pivotal role of This petition was available online at http://saudireform.com, but the site is now inoperative. 29 F. G. Gause III, Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East, (New York, 2011), p. 9. 30 K. M. Al-Mughamisi, Al-hiwar: adabuh wa tatbiqatuh fi al-tarbiyya alislamiyya. Markaz al-malik Abd al-Aziz li-l-hiwar al-watani/King Abdulaziz 28

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dialogue within the ‘nation’ and with ‘the other’, as essential initiatives to face present identity crises and the search for an identity shared by most Saudi citizens in the kingdom, is just a first and still too weak step, liable to fail if unaccompanied by more effective policies at the institutional level in the Kingdom. The fact that the internal revitalisation of the concept of muwatana is trying to oppose the sectarian narrative (Sunni versus Shi‘a) is very positive – no doubt the country is more openly recognized as multicultural – and yet more efforts are needed to implement an institutionally-based project, able to bridge the still existing sectarian, regional, tribal and social divides and to integrate all the groups in the political and social system. Internal debates on such issues have also been developing through the various forms of social communication, from the more traditional ones, such as the diwaniyya (weekly meeting in private houses) to the more recent ones, such as the virtual muntadayat (online forums and blogs) through new media. Relationships between generations and between men and women, even in contexts known as the most conservative ones in the Kingdom, from Najd to al-Qasim, have been changing. With 8.5 million people accessing the Internet, more than six million Facebook users and more than 3 million Twitter users in 2012, Saudi Arabia has extremely high rates of growth in the field of the new media. 31 Internal debates on issues of politics and religion, until recently considered taboos, can be seen as truly revolutionary, while the statements of some authorities, who advocate the need for stricter monitoring of the online sector, trigger strong domestic reactions as well. 32 In this sense, the translation of the culture of the diwaniyya Center for National Dialogue, (Riyadh, 2007); M. S. Khoja, Al-Hiwar. Adabih wa Muntalaqatih wa tarbiyya al-abnaʾ ʿalayh, Markaz al-malik Abd alAziz li-l-hiwar al-watani/King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue, (Riyadh, 2008). 31 The Social Clinic (2013), ‘The State of Social Media in Saudi Arabia 2012’, http://www.thesocialclinic.com. 32 The words of the Grand Mufti, in a harsh accusation to bloggers seen as ‘clowns’, are in contrast both with the widespread use of Twitters by authorities, the Crown Prince included, and with the words of the

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in the virtual world ends up having an unprecedented impact. Against this backdrop, the education system reform comes to the fore. The pace and extent of reform in this direction will determine both the internal re-elaboration process of ‘a national integrated identity’, advocating mutual respect, peace and security for all people, and the role of the Kingdom in intercultural and inter-faith dialogue in the Muslim world and at the global level.

THE SAUDI ‘NATIONAL THOUGHT’ AND THE ARABISLAMIC WORLD AFTER THE EVENTS OF 2011: AN ASSESSMENT WITH A LOOK AT THE MEDITERRANEAN

Since the events of 2011 in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia experienced both domestic pressure for social and political reforms and a more pro-active role in the Mediterranean Arab region. When focusing on the latter, it is interesting to wonder if the evolving ‘national thought’ has affected Saudi foreign policy in any way, and if it is helping to open the Saudi state externally to a different approach. Deeply rooted historical legacy and ideational factors within the Kingdom keep affecting the state’s political legitimacy, as well as the dynamics of its relations with the neighbours. No doubt, Saudi Arabia always tried to reinforce its role in the Islamic world, and the ‘post-Arab Spring’ environment is no exception: Islam will always be a key-factor in the foreign policy of the Kingdom. Against this backdrop, the Salafiyya depoliticized thought, in its official ‘peaceful’, quietist incarnation, supported by the Saudi government, emerges very clearly. It shapes a statist version of Islam, which means that it aims both to give state authorities full control of clerics, who are incorporated in the civil service, and to oppose autonomous Islamic movements and power centres. Saudi foreign policy is certainly influenced by the Salafi Salman al-’Awda. The latter, while emphasizing the inadequacy of the Grand Mufti’s approach, has openly criticized those who see the Internet as a threat to security, and he called on the authorities to instead concentrate on improving services for users. Cf. Saudi Gazette (2013), “Twitter beyond ministry control, says Khoja”, 15.02.2013.

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Kingdom’s role as ‘Custodianship of the two Holy Sites’: crucial governmental and non-governmental Islamic organisations are headquartered in the kingdom, such as the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the non-governmental Rabita al-ʿalam alislami (Islamic World League) and the Fiqh Muslim Congress. The impact of these organisations can easily reach both the EU’s southern neighbourhood and Europe itself. The external ideational influence coming from Saudi Arabia is certainly twofold, as we have to make a distinction between the official Salafi line and the unofficial one. Even within the official Salafi line’s external projection, the flexible interpretation of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s thought comes to the fore. That does not exclude of course that the rigid approach can persist; it is still widely supported by some reactionary elements both in the royal family and the religious establishment in the country and can certainly be found in some unofficial channels towards other countries and regions. However, a ‘knowledge-based’ Islamic line of thought, developing stronger links with the peaceful wing of Salafiyya, close to the official Saudi network, has been emerging as a significant determinant in ‘post-Arab Spring’ events, although often obscured by violent extremist Salafi groups. The ambiguities in Saudi Arabia’s dealing with major Arab crises between 2011 and 2014, from North Africa to Syria, are often the consequence of the domestic complexity. The debate on the legal system, as expressed in the evolving ‘national thought’, is not to be neglected and it sheds light on the concept of ijtihad and its relevance for Sunni Islam. Bearing in mind that neither the iftaʾ, or deliverance of formal legal opinions (fatawa, sing. fatwa) nor the taʾmim, a form of legal article issued by the government, 33 compose the shariʿa (Islamic Law), it is clear that debating ijtihad becomes even more crucial given the leading position of the Kingdom in Sunni Islam. The encouragement of contemporary authentic ijtihad as a collective, consensual interpretation effort of religious foundational texts by trustworthy A well-known taʾmim issued by the Ministry of Interior in Saudi Arabia regards the ban on women driving, but it is the consequence of neither a fatwa nor a precept established by Islamic Law. 33

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ʿulama has been inspiring transnational bodies sponsored by Saudi Arabia, such as the Fiqh Academy (al-Majmaʿ al-fiqh al-Islami) of the Muslim World League, established in Mecca in 1977, and the International Fiqh Academy (Majmaʿ al-fiqhi al-Islami al-duwali), headquartered in Jeddah since 1983. Although including scholars with different legal approaches, these academies are dominated by a Salafi orientation towards the derivation of legal norms and the principle of ijtihad. The latter is at the centre of the internal reform process in Saudi Arabia itself, as attested by the establishment of the Saudi Fiqh Academy (Majmaʿ al-fiqhi al-saʿudi) by King Abdullah in March 2011. 34 The Saudi national interest to depoliticize Islamism certainly intertwines more and more both with this discourse on ijtihad and with some choices in foreign policy, clearly reflecting internal challenges and contradictions. 35 Islam and economics intertwine in the Saudi engagement in the Arab-Muslim world, and rising convergence between the leadership’s interests and the interests of various protagonists taking part in the evolving ‘national narrative’ cannot be neglected: the business community, present in all the main Saudi regions, with a particularly prominent role of the Hijazi component, comes to the fore in this respect. Competence and professionalism have been growing within many family companies, even outside the commercial strongholds of Jeddah, Riyadh and al-Hasa, and yet challenges posed by globalization are huge for most of them. Against this backdrop the enduring traditional ‘national’ alliance between the private sector and the leadership may dwindle, if pressures faced by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are not properly addressed. Financial barriers that SMEs often face are a major hindrance both to male and female entrepreneurs and Saudi Arabia is no exception: limited access to external funding and to bank loans is a fact for SMEs in the whole region, even in GCC countries. The number of Saudi female entrepreneurs is certainly growing and it is not rare that some of them become real tokens of E. Maestri, ‘Opportunities for Italian-Saudi Relations in the PostArab Spring Environment’, in Italy and Saudi Arabia Confronting the Challenges of the XXI Century, Ed. S. Colombo, (Roma, 2013). 35 R. Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, (New York, 2009), p. 329. 34

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a renewed state-centred ‘national narrative’, tracing back to the most authentic Islamic business environment, where excellent women like Khadija, were strong and successful. And yet, despite some leadership initiatives to support these women, hindrances to their business are often huge. They certainly require easier access to funds and a greater ability to network beyond their region. The business community, both its female and male components, is certainly part of a middle class, which is regarded as crucial to the internal balances and to re-vitalisation and/or regression of national awareness and internal cohesion. 36 It is the same community that is liable to play a more constructive role in the economic relations of Saudi Arabia in the Arab world and the Mediterranean region. Against a quite disappointing backdrop in terms of EuroSaudi and EU-GCC cooperation in the southern Mediterranean, even at bilateral levels, the growing influence of Saudi Arabia in the EU’s southern neighbourhood, at this transitional stage, puts even more emphasis on the rising importance of confidence-building and dialogue. That is in line with the already mentioned ‘flexible approach’ of Saudi Arabia, as confirmed by King Abdullah’s words, when, in 2011, he referred to the King Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue (KAICIID) as a ‘gate between Muslims and other religions and cultures’. The decision in 2013 to establish in Medina the Centre for Dialogue among Islamic Sects, and, last but not least, the declaration that ‘the door of interpretation (ijtihad) is open’ point to the relevance of the new approach. 37 It is through this multidirectional dialogue within Islam and with ‘the other’ that the role of Saudi Arabia might be shaped and perceived within a new fruitful dimension. The present worrying scenario in the Mediterranean and the Middle East is affecting in some ways the construction of an integrated identity in Saudi Arabia, while converging with the possibility of more coherent Saudi policies, which can derive from such a process. Transnational M. Alnuaim, ‘The Composition of the Saudi Middle Class: a Preliminary Study’, GRC Gulf Paper, (October 2013), p. 5. 37 Saudi Gazette, 17 October 2013. 36

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ideologies are a fact, and transnational media funded by non-state players certainly aim to re-define peoples’ identities in the whole Arab-Islamic world, along different lines ‘at the intersection of the national, the regional and the global’. 38 The state must face the challenge of these alternative identity makers. Therefore, in the Saudi leadership’s perspective, efforts to reinforce the values of dialogue at all levels seem to gain unprecedented prominence as a political tool aimed both ‘to securitise’ Saudi Arabia domestically, and to promote new convergences of interests between state-actors in the much troubled southern and eastern Mediterranean.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paul Aarts, ‘Maintaining Authoritarianism: The Jerky Path of Political Reform in Saudi Arabia’, Orient, 52 (2011), 29–43. ———, Saudi Arabia in the Balance, (London, 2005). Mubarak Al Hammad, ‘An Overview of Urban Development Process’, in Urban Development in Saudi Arabia. Challenges and Opportunities, Eds. S. Al-Hathloul, N. Edadan, (Riyadh, 1995). ‘Abd Allah al-Salih al-‘Uthaymin, Storia dell’Arabia Saudita, (Palermo, 2001). Hatoon Al-Fassi, ‘Introduction’, in Saudi Arabia and Women in Higher Education and Cultural Dialogue. New Perspectives, Eds. A. Profanter, S.R. Cate, V. Fiorani Piacentini, E. Maestri, CRiSSMA Working Paper, (Milano, 2010). K. M. Al-Mughamisi, Al-hiwar: adabuh wa tatbiqatuh fi al-tarbiyya alislamiyya. Markaz al-malik Abd al-Aziz li-l-hiwar al-watani, (King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue, 2007). Mishary Alnuaim, ‘The Composition of the Saudi Middle Class: a Preliminary Study’, (GRC Gulf Paper, 2013). Madawi Al-Rasheed, ‘The Shi‘a of Saudi Arabia: a Minority in Search of Cultural Authenticity’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 25/1 (1998). M. Zayani, ‘Transnational Media, Regional Politics and State Security: Saudi Arabia between Tradition and Modernity’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39/3 (2012), p. 323. 38

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———, A Most Masculine State. Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia, (New York, 2013). Othman Y. Al-Rawaf, Policies and Programs of Rural Development in Saudi Arabia: A Presentation and Evaluation, (Riyadh, 1980). S. Al-Sakhawi, Al-dawʾ al-lamiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tasiʿ, Cairo, 1353 AH). Jafar Alshayeb, Governance of Sectarian Diversity in Saudi Arabia, (Arab Reform Initiative, 2013). Soraya Altorki, Women in Saudi Arabia: Ideology and Behavior Among the Elite, (New York, 1986). Paul Aarts, Gerd Nonneman, Saudi Arabia in the Balance, (London, 2005). James Buchan, ‘Secular and Religious Opposition in Saudi Arabia’, in State, Society and Economy in Saudi Arabia, Ed. T. Niblock, (London, 1982). Adeed Dawisha, Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair, (Princeton, 2003). Natana J. Delong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad, (New York, 2004). F. Gregory Gause III, Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East, (New York, 2011). Shadi Hamid, ‘Old Friends, New Neighborhood: the United States, the GCC, and Their Responses to the Arab Spring’, in The GCC in the Mediterranean in Light of the Arab Spring, Eds. S. Colombo, K. Coats-Ulrichsen, S. Ghabra, S. Hamid, E. Ragab, (GMF-IAI Mediterranean Paper Series, 2012). Thomas Hegghammer, Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and PanIslamism since 1979, (Cambridge, 2010). Caroline Montagu, ‘Civil Society and the Voluntary Sector in Saudi Arabia’, The Middle East Journal 64/1 (2010). M. S. Khoja, Al-Hiwar. Adabih wa Muntalaqatih wa tarbiyya al-abnaʾ ʿalayh, Markaz al-malik Abd al-Aziz li-l-hiwar al-watani/King Abdulaziz Center for National Dialogue (Riyadh, 2008). Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom, (New York, 2009). Stephane Lacroix, Awakening Islam: A History of Islamism in Saudi Arabia, (Cambridge Mass., 2010).

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Laurence Louer, Transnational Shia Politics. Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf, (London, 2008). Giacomo Luciani, ‘From Private Sector to National Bourgeoisie: Saudi Arabian Business’, in Saudi Arabia in the Balance, Eds. P. Aarts, G. Nonneman, (London, 2005). Elena Maestri, La regione del Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Sviluppo e sicurezza umana in Arabia, (Milano, 2009). ———, Opportunities for Italian-Saudi Relations in the Post-Arab Spring Environment, in Italy and Saudi Arabia Confronting the Challenges of the XXI Century, Ed. S. Colombo, (Roma, 2013). Roel Meijer, Joas Wagemakers, ‘The Struggle for Citizenship of the Shiites of Saudi Arabia’, in The Dynamics of Sunni-Shia Relationships: Doctrine, Transnationalism, Intellectuals and the Media, Ed. B. Marechal, S. Zemni, (London, 2013). Tim Niblock, Saudi Arabia. Power, Legitimacy and Survival, (London and New York, 2006). James Onley, Suleyman Khalaf, ‘Shaikhly Authority in the Pre-Oil Gulf: An Historical-Anthropological Study’, History and Anthropology, 17/3 (2006). George S. Rentz, The Birth of the Islamic Reform Movement in Saudi Arabia. Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab (1703/4–1792) and the Beginnings of Unitarian Empire in Arabia, (London, 2004). UNDP, Arab Human Development Report 2012, (New York, 2012). Mohamed Zayani, ‘Transnational Media, Regional Politics and State Security: Saudi Arabia between Tradition and Modernity’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39/3 (2012).

5. RELIGION AND NATIONALISM: PALESTINIAN CHRISTIANS AND RELIGIOUS LEADERSHIP IN THE MIDST OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT PAOLO MAGGIOLINI 1

During the first Intifada (1987–1993) the established Churches in Jerusalem set aside their traditional divisions and rivalries in a series of joint initiatives on behalf of justice, peace and human rights. They also publicly testified to the development of a committed attempt to reconfigure the relationship between religion, nation and territory within the local Christian dimension of the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. This was an effort to reinvigorate and strengthen Palestinian Christian self-perception and identity from both the political and religious perspectives. These unprecedented ecumenical actions brought the Christian Churches of the Holy Land from the margins of society into public life. However, this historical development was not simply a reaction or an adaptation to a political dynamic that was mobilizing a large part of the Palestinian people. It was, first of all, the result of a process that began in the 1967 post-war era thanks to the clergy’s increasing engagement in social and political issues and growing coordination amongst the local hierarchies with regard to Israeli policies and the Dr. Paolo Maggiolini is a Research Fellow in the History of Middle East, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Catholic University of the S. Heart, Milan. 1

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internal demographical balance, as well as the future status of the Old City of Jerusalem. During the 1980s, the appointments of Bishop Samir Kafity (Anglican) in 1984, of Archbishop, and Patriarchal Vicar in Jerusalem, Lutfi Laham (Greek Catholic) in 1981 and of Latin Patriarch Michel Sabbah in 1987 (the first Arab and Palestinian Patriarch in the history of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem), along with the formulation of a ‘Palestinian theology of liberation’ led by Naim Ateek and the work of the al-Liqa’ center and Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Centre, had strong effects on local established churches and their communities. These factors favoured a search for new understandings of the role of Palestinian Christians through an innovative exegetical interpretation of the Holy Scriptures in relation to the on-going political dynamics within both Israel and Palestine. The need, first, to ponder and engage with the significance of the Intifada and then the chance Oslo offered with the foundation of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (which, a few years later, suffered a tragic setback with the eruption of the second Intifada) made these theological, exegetical, ecclesiastical and, therefore, religious dynamics closely related to the on-going political process. This was particularly needed for two reasons. First, Palestine is a territory where, traditionally, any discussion of theological considerations immediately resounds in the wider context of national and international politics. 2 The two Intifadas, the launch of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process with Oslo and the signing of the concordat with Israel in 1994 again reflected such intertwining. Indeed, the religious leaders’ voice was strategic to expressing local Christian needs and interests in a period of dramatic change, especially for the rising influence of the religious factor both in Israel and in the Palestinian territories. Secondly, the prospect, probably for the very first time after the British Mandate period, of concretely meditating on the Micael P. Prior, ‘You Will be my Witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the Ends of the Earth. A Christian Perspective on Jerusalem’, in Palestinian Christians: Religion, Politics and Society in the Holy Land, Ed. Anthony O’Mahony, (London, 1999), p. 97. 2

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significance and extent of a Palestinian Christian presence divided between two nation-state authorities (Israel and the proto-state PNA) further increased the association between religion and politics, especially in the perspective of the Christian minority, their status and position. Indeed, the association between religion, politics and territory was not accidental. It was necessary and, under certain aspects, complementary. This fostered the will to rethink the role of the church, clergy and laity within both Israel and Palestine, and in relation to Judaism and Islam, in connection with both local political fields. Palestinian Christian leaders dedicated their commitment to promoting a notion of citizenship and national identity under the banner of peace, justice and mutual recognition. This favoured a specific theological reflection where a reinvigorated understanding of the Bible was considered necessary to face the ongoing political dynamic, and vice-versa. Furthermore, the Arabization of the higher echelons of most established churches, with the exception of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, further sustained this attitude and commitment. Consequently, it developed an understanding of interreligious dialogue between the three monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism and Islam) not just as a theological exercise but as necessary to promoting a common vision about the significance of sharing a land of profound symbolic significance, where religion and politics strongly overlap and intertwine. At the same time, the ongoing political developments triggered an evolution and change in the relation with urban space and the territory, carrying out specific politics of sacred space in order to promote the Christian public role within a dynamic of consolidating the Palestinian nation. In this regard, the fact that in 1995 the celebration of Christmas in Bethlehem was proclaimed a national holiday and symbol of the Palestinian nation represented more than a simple, fortuitous intersection between the liturgical calendar and the Oslo road map. This signified the intention of

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inscribing the Christian Church, as a reality both universal and local, within the Palestinian state-building process. 3 Within this historical framework, and in a context where religion and politics continuously overlap, giving strength to the ideal of the nation state as the fulfilment of specific religious mythologies in a sanctified territory, the position of Sabbah emerged as a testimony to the possibility and the need to deeply rethink and reconsider the significance of the Palestinian Christian presence and identity in relation to Israel, the PNA and, finally, the image of the Holy Land itself. 4 Within a broad spectrum of actors, movements and individuals, both in Israel and Palestine, who advanced new views and understanding with respect to religion and nation, Sabbah advanced a particular understanding of the Bible through politics, and politics through the Bible. During his Patriarchate (from 1988–2008), he strenuously extended continuous invitations to read and understand the Old Testament in the midst of the contemporary Middle East’s political situation. He also explored the development of the relationship between state and church, and between different Christian Churches, particularly regarding new ecumenical understandings of Near Eastern society and the role of Christian Churches within Near Eastern public life, shaping the Palestinian Christian vocation for being a contemporary expression of the universal and reinvigorated Palestinian local church. Sabbah’s attempt to redefine the parameters of his religious leadership and the position of Palestinian Christians with regard to both Israel and the PNA was particularly significant given the peculiar historical condition of local Arab Christianity. In fact, Arab Christianity within this context clearly testifies to the intrinsic ‘complexity’ and the shifting and relational dimension of being a minority. According to the chosen perspective, Arab Christians are institutionally, politically and practically recognized as a minority according to a distinct Sossie Andézian, Le sacré à l’épreuve du politique. Noël à Bethléem, (Paris, 2011), p. 8. 4 On the role of religious leaders in conflict and peacemaking see for instance: Timothy D. Sisk (ed.), Between Terror and Tolerance, Religious Leaders, Conflict, and Peacemaking, (Baltimore, 2011), p. 2. 3

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cultural tradition or a different religious affiliation or both. This also implied negating their Arab character in favour of an alternative ‘ethnic’ identity, such as Aramean, Phoenician, Copt or Chaldean. This situation posed concrete limits and boundaries to their political participation and fostered their confinement within the minority dimension. Although refusing any political role, Sabbah’s strenuous commitment to providing Palestinian Christians with new perspectives of their presence in and attachment to this land, and role as believers in the faith, made a vivid contribution to redefining these boundaries and overcoming their rationale, offering new understanding of the content in relation to both the Palestinian nation and the Christian presence within Israel. Therefore, in order to point out how original Sabbah’s contribution was, the following pages analyse how political powers produced and enforced religious and ethnic divisions, with particular reference to the Christian dimension. Additionally, the article focuses on how religious leadership, in particular the institution of the Patriarch, developed within this religious, political, legal and administrative framework. Finally, it analyses how Sabbah concentrated on revising and reconsidering the role and position of Palestinian Christians in local political fields, from a theological and exegetical perspective, inevitably resulting in a wider socio-political reflection on contemporary Israeli and Palestinian realities.

THE IMPOSITION OF SECTARIAN LOGIC WITHIN THE LAND OF PALESTINE DURING THE MANDATE

In order to understand the rationale that supported and determined the establishment and consolidation of Christian community boundaries and spheres in the land of Palestine, it is necessary to reconsider the situation of recurring wars, shifting state borders and changes in the ruling political authorities that characterized the history of this territory during the 20th century. Moreover, the issue of the management of Holy Places and the Status Quo further complicated the situation, embracing legal, political and economic

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aspects. 5 The overexposure of this issue frequently attracted most of the interest of Christian institutions and hierarchies, overshadowing the local Christian laity’s aspirations, especially from a political standpoint, that tended to be relegated to a publicly silent and de-politicized position in favour solely of the religiouscommunity dimension. This was also true when high-ranking religious leaders took positions in relation to the development of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism. For example, although for different reasons, during the Mandate period the Latin Patriarch Barlassina expressed in his official statements a position of equal contempt for Zionist 6 and for Palestinian nationalist platforms because both were perceived as detrimental to the interest of the church and the institution of the Catholic religious community, interpreted as a self-referential and detached, closed social space. 7 The ideal of nationalism, as well as any British centralizing projects that could have weakened the autonomy of the community, was to be fought tout court. Of course, most of the laity adopted a totally different stance and, especially in the case of the Greek Orthodox, tried to reposition and integrate the community dimension within the wider Palestinian nationalist movement. 8 In fact, from the beginning of the 20th century, Palestinian Christians constantly participated in the nationalist movement with the aim of overcoming any attempt to force them into a marginal position, supporting the creation of an ideology and political platform Michael Dumper, The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict, (London, 2002), pp. 20–21. 6 Paolo Pieraccini, ‘Il Patriarcato latino di Gerusalemme (1918– 1940). Ritratto di un patriarca scomodo: mons. Luigi Barlassina’, Il Politico, LXIII, n. 4 (1998), p. 627. 7 Paolo Maggiolini, ‘The Influence of Latin-Melkite Relations in the Land of Transjordan From the Rebirth of the Latin Patriarchate to the Foundation of the Archdiocese of Petra and Philadelphia (1866–1932)’, Living Stones Yearbook, The Living Stones of the Holy Land Trust (2012), pp. 179–180. 8 Anthony O’Mahony (ed.), Palestinian Christians: Religion, Politics and Society in the Holy Land, (London, 1999), p. 10. 5

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sufficiently broad to include them as full and equal members and participants. 9 Rewriting the history of the imposition of community boundaries and spheres (from both the ethnic and religious perspectives) means understanding how institutional sectarianism has been imposed as the core organizing principle of the modern state within this land, as well as within the whole Middle East region, since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. 10 While during the late Ottoman period the millet system had already defined the social, political and economic significance of communal labels (although without preventing Arab Christians from perceiving themselves to be the intellectual vanguard of modern Palestine) British Mandate authorities transformed Christians into a legal ‘religious minority’ as an integral part of the wider communal politics that helped London to incorporate European Jews, at the same time controlling the Muslim presence and activism. To a large extent, the British administration decided to engage with the local Arab Christian population mainly as a religious minority to avoid the politicization of ecclesiastical issues, preventing close relationships with Palestinian Muslims. 11 With the objective of ‘guaranteeing’ and preserving identities considered ancient and ‘original’, British authorities encapsulated Arab Christians within the minority institutional dimension, trying to detach them from their Muslim brothers, favouring their marginalization and fixing the hub of political confrontation within the sole continuum of Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Religious, Political and Social Status of the Christian Communities in Palestine, 1800–1930’, in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner, Kevork Hintlian, (London, 1995), p. 247. 10 Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine, (Austin, 2011), 1. Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon, (Berkeley, 2000), p. 7. 11 Qustandi Shomali, ‘Palestinian Christians: Politics, Press and Religious Identity 1900–1948’, in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner, Kevork Hintlian, (London, 1995), p. 247. 9

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Muslims versus Jews. This resulted in a paradox. It laid the basis for the development of the roles of religious communities and their religious leadership as politicized institutions in their ability to represent their respective communities vis-à-vis state authority. This was promoted as the necessary guarantee for their existence. At the same time, it sought to isolate Arab Christian communities from the political history of this land, forcing them into the sole confines of the protected religious minority, as depoliticized social actors. 12 Therefore, although the Mandate was a period of relative community stability and institutional growth, 13 Arab Christians in Palestine were caught up in a constant dynamic of renegotiating and re-positioning their place and role. 14 Yet at the beginning of the Mandate a joint Muslim-Christian front within the emerging Palestinian Arab National Movement, concerned with the economic, commercial, general welfare and political issues of Arab Palestinian inhabitants 15 had testified to an attempt at deploying explicitly multi-religious rhetoric to overcome the sectarian divide. This joint front proposed an Arab political perspective, for both Christians and Muslims, able to counterbalance the development of Zionism and British colonial design. 16 At the end of the 1920s, this experience had already reached an impasse, confirming how far the communal idea had taken hold in Palestine. 17 During the 1930s, Muslim leaders constantly sought to stress the role of Islam in the formation of Palestinian nationalist identity, relegating the Christian component Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, p. 3. Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Religious, Political’, p. 265. 14 Noah Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine. Communalism and Nationalism, 1917–1948, (Edinburgh, 2013), p. 196. 15 Anthony O’Mahony (ed.), Palestinian Christians, p. 39. 16 Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, p. 17. 17 Helen Bryer, ‘Arab Orthodox Christians of Jerusalem and Palestine in the Inter-war Period: a Study in Religious and Political Identity and Church-State Relations’, in Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics, Ed. Anthony O’Mahony, (London, 2008), p. 230. 12 13

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to a marginal position. 18 The recognition of the Supreme Muslim Council in 1921 not only granted Arab Muslims an institutional voice within the Mandate, but also favoured the emergence of a religious nationalism effectively employing Islamic rhetoric and practically corresponding to the British communal project. Under these circumstances, Christian representation was non-existent and the Patriarchal leadership began to increase its role in communal representation. 19 At the same time, Arab Christian leaders tried to react to this situation, engaging in the debate about the creation of a legislative council for the Mandate, developing new political rhetoric to give voice to a multi-church alignment supporting communal representation. Sectarian politics was imposed. None of this attempt was very successful and, by 1948, the Palestinian Christian community was largely politically marginalized.

CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY BOUNDARIES AND SPHERES AFTER 1948

The end of World War II led to a second determinant development. Britain’s unilateral decision to withdraw from Palestine was soon followed by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948, bringing a drastic change to the regional balance of power and to political boundaries. The land of Palestine ceased to be a political unit and was divided amongst three different authorities: the newborn state of Israel, the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (which in 1950 unilaterally annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem after the Israeli-Jordanian Armistice of Rhodes in 1950) and Egypt (which imposed a sort of military protectorate over the Gaza Strip following the Israeli-Egyptian Armistice of 1949). The immediate 1948 post-war socio-political environment was characterized by contrasting feelings and emotions between the Zionists’

Leonard Marsh, ‘Palestinian Christian Theology as a New and Contemporary Expression of Eastern Christian Thought’, Living Stones Yearbook, The Living Stones of the Holy Land Trust (2012), p. 115. 19 Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity, p. 102; p. 105. 18

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enthusiasm for the successful realization of their political programme and the traumatic awakening of the Arab Palestinians. 20 To a large extent, both Israel and Jordan showed a similar understanding regarding the importance of preserving the denominational system. In fact, on the basis of British experience (Jordan had already applied this system within the Emirate between the two world wars), they granted extensive autonomy to religious communities, institutionalizing the religious dimension. Therefore, individuals were recognized both as citizens and as members of a community defined along religious lines, where clerics controlled their personal status, a guarantee but also a factor that strengthened their minority character and the prominence of religious leadership. On the one hand, for the almost 180,000 Palestinians (among whom 39,000 were Christians) that were integrated into the state of Israel, 21 the post-1948 era was the beginning of almost two decades of cultural and political isolation from the rest of Palestine and the Middle East, during which they tried to adapt to their minority status, stressing their cultural distinctiveness and adopting a politically quiescent attitude towards the state. 22 On the other, the Palestinians, both Christian and Muslim, integrated into the Jordanian Kingdom, were exposed to the Hashemite project of promoting a new ‘Jordanian’ political identity created out of the Transjordanian and Palestinian characters, increasing the feeling of uncertainty after the 1948 war. 23 It was from this double source of negation of the existence of a Palestinian national identity that the Marchadour Alain, Neuhaus David, La Terra, la Bibbia e la Storia, (Milano, 2007), p. 154. 21 See for instance: Kamal Abdulfattah, ‘The Geographical Distribution of the Palestinians on Both Sides of the 1949 Armistice Line’, in Palestinians over the Green Line, Ed. Alexaner Schölch, (London, 1983) pp. 103–104. 22 Suhaila Haddad, Ronald D. McLaurin, Emile A. Nakhleh, ‘Minorities in Containment: The Arabs of Israel’, in The Political Role of Minority Groups in the Middle East, Ed. Ronald D. McLaurin, (New York, 1979), p. 76. 23 Elena Dodge, Jordan First: a History of the Intellectual and Political Economy of Jordanian Antiquity, (Chicago, 2009), p. 394. 20

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contemporary Palestinian National Movement evolved, after the political failures of the traditional urban elites during the Mandate. 24 The will to give birth to a wider nationalist movement motivated the political Palestinian leadership to the conscious inclusion of Christians. From this understanding, two different trajectories appeared. On the one hand, a secular-nationalist approach emerged which assigned religion to the private realm, removing it from the political arena (all the Fronts). On the other, a nationalist agenda was imposed with an implicit religious identity, although interpreted as one of the cultural and civic factors of Palestinian identity (Fatah). 25 The war of 1967 was another turning point, bringing the end of Hashemite authority over the East Bank and East Jerusalem, marking the beginning of a new phase in the history of this land and its societies, which are still searching for a final and peaceful solution. After 1967, Christian communities in Old Jerusalem, the West Bank and Israel may be described as communities in crisis, deeply afflicted by demographic decline due to emigration. 26 At the same time, Christian communities experienced a new period of consolidation, expanding their international networks of connections and re-positioning their presence and role. To a large extent, they tried to mediate and cooperate with the state, avoiding politicization and mobilization against government policies. This new phase of transition was facilitated by Israeli acceptance of recognising the development of community associations. At the same time, also on the side of the Muslim community, the establishment of the military government in the territories corresponded to an intensification of Brotherhood communal and political activity, centred on mosques, charitable associations, See for instance: Reinhard Winter, ‘Back to Square One: A study in the Re-emergence of the Palestinian Identity in the West Bank 1967– 1980’, in Palestinians over the Green Line, Ed. Alexaner Schölch, (London, 1983), pp. 66–69. 25 Helga Baumgarten, ‘Politicization of Muslim-Christian Relations in the Palestinian National Movement’, in Islam, Judaism, and the Political Role of Religions in the Middle East, Ed. John Bunzl, (Florida, 2004), p. 92. 26 Michael Dumper, The Politics of Sacred Space, p. 105. 24

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student councils and trade missions. 27 This ‘liberal’ attitude favoured community life for the Arab component, but at the same time fostered new divisions among them, on which the state structured part of its system of control and cooptation. 28 However, during the last part of the 1970s a change in local politics and balances of power began to develop, favouring a new phase of re-positioning and re-defining the Christian Churches’ perception of their role and presence within Israel and the West Bank. In Israel, this change was partially due to the increasing political role played by the Likud party, which won the election in 1977. The Likud party focused on developing a political agenda aimed at strengthening the Israeli Jewish character, overriding past willingness to negotiate with the local churches. Directly controlling the Israel-lands Administration, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and the Ministry of Housing, the Likud party particularly concentrated on Jerusalem, fostering the development of a new dynamic of ‘semantization’ and redefinition of local spaces based on Israeli and Jewish identity. 29 Between 1974 and 1983, Israel supported the implementation of new Jewish settlements precisely at the ‘core’ of the greatest Palestinian population concentration. This fostered further fragmentation and discontinuity within Palestinian lands and villages. 30 Also corresponding to this process was the development of religious Zionism that fuelled the efforts to settle in the ‘biblical’ lands of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and Gaza, and aimed at reimagining secular Zionism by integrating religion into a reenvisioned Israeli identity. 31 These dynamics were integrally part of Meir Hatina, ‘Hamas and the Oslo accords: Religious dogma in a changing political reality’, Mediterranean Politics, 4/3 (1999), p. 37. 28 Daphne Tsimhoni, Christian Communities in Jerusalem and the West Bank Since 1948: An Historical, Social, and Political Study, (Westport, 1993), p. 412. 29 Michael Dumper, The Politics of Sacred Space, pp. 76–77. 30 Una McGahern, Palestinian Christians in Israel: State attitudes towards non-Muslims in a Jewish state, (London, New York, 2011), p. 63. 31 Atalia Omer, Jason A. Springs, Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook, (Santa Barbara, 2013), p. 99. 27

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a wide process of intertwining between religion and politics within Israel, which constitutes a broad spectrum where it is possible to find anti-Zionist, Yiddish-speaking Neturei Karta and territorial messianic settlers, such as Gush Emumim. 32 The unceasing development of militant Jewish and Western Christian messianic organizations, such as the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem and the Temple Mount Foundation, created continuous tensions between Christian communities and the state. 33 In 1990, the occupation of Saint John’s Hospice by a group of Orthodox Jewish settlers without any intervention by the authorities was a concrete demonstration of the change occurring in government strategy and increased the churches’ concern regarding Israeli desires to alter the Statu Quo and the traditional demographical and social balance of power within the Old City of Jerusalem. This episode led to unprecedented measures, including the closing of Christian holy places in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem, funeral knells tolled and a special day of prayer. 34 At the same time, during this incident, the Arab Orthodox laity again expressed its desire to take control of the Patriarchate, opposing its traditional politics of land sales and leases. In 1992, the Arab Orthodox Initiative Committee in East Jerusalem, followed by a meeting in Amman recognized by both Jordan and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, publicly asserted that the Patriarchate’s property could no longer be considered the exclusive domain of Greek-Cypriot hierarchies, but Tristan Sturm, Seth Frantzman, ‘Religious geopolitics of Palestinian Christianity: Palestinian Christian Zionists, Palestinian Liberation Theologists, and American Missions to Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies, 51/3 (2015), p. 435. 33 George S. Khoury, ‘The Social Role of Arab Christians in Israel, Jordan and Palestine’, Al Liqa’ Journal, 6 (1996), p. 15. 34 Orly Levy, Erik Cohen, ‘The Occupation by Jews Of St. John’s Hospice In The Old City Of Jerusalem: An Analysis Of An Iconic Event’, in Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 26/2, Summer (1997), p. 203. See also Michael Dumper, ‘The Christian Churches of Jerusalem in the Post-Oslo Period’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 31/2, Winter (2002), p. 54. 32

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was integrally part of Palestinian heritage and assets. 35 This position not only revived the traditional tensions between laity and clergy within the Orthodox Patriarchate, but also showed the Arab Orthodox will to ascribe Patriarchal property to Palestinian national patrimony and heritage, contrasting what came to be described as Israel’s ‘Judaization’ 36 process. Similarly, the developments occurring in the West Bank and Gaza, especially during the 1980s, with the growing importance of the militant Islamic movement of Hamas (operating independently from the Palestinian Liberation Organization [PLO]) and the disengagement of the Hashemite Kingdom from the West Bank in 1988, drastically reshaped political reality within the Palestinian socio-political field and fostered the entrance of Christian communities into local public space. 37 Accordingly, the development of a Palestinian Liberation (contextual) Theology is fully part of this spectrum, proposing to reconfigure the traditional reading of the Bible in relation to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. From this perspective, Palestinian Liberation (contextual) Theology tried to develop a grassroots movement with Palestinian Christians at its heart, making sense of Israeli settlements, limited Palestinian opportunities and Arab nationalism. 38 This effort increased with the recognition of the PLO and the signing of the Oslo Accord that led to the establishment of a Palestinian quasi-state apparatus first in Gaza and Jericho, then in Ramallah, Bethlehem and areas adjacent to Jerusalem. This political development forced established Christian Churches to re-define their traditional strategy, expanding their cooperative relationship beyond Israel and Jordan. 39 This process became increasingly difficult after 2006 and Hamas’ electoral victory, after which followed the confrontation Michael Dumper, The Politics of Sacred Space, p. 120. Oren Yiftachel, ‘“Ethnocracy”. The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine’, in Across the Wall: Narratives of Israel-Palestinian History, Ed. I. Pappé, J. Hilal, (London, 2010), p. 300. 37 Michael Dumper, The Politics of Sacred Space, p. 117. 38 Najla Kassab, ‘A Middle Eastern Christian Approach to the Old Testament’, NEST Theological Review, 13 (1992), p. 39. 39 Ibid., p. 117. 35 36

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with Fatah that led to the latter’s expulsion from Gaza. Within a land already riven by multiple rifts and conflicts, this event created another separation between different views of the role of religion in the state (namely, Islam). 40 Since the first Intifada, the churches reacted to these changes, showing a new interest in socially and politically engaging with both laity and clergy, seeking greater coordination among the different hierarchies, and repositioning themselves in the wake of the Oslo Accords and the period of negotiations during the 1990s. This commitment and attitude was particularly important given a sort of lying contradiction existent within the Palestinian nationalist movement regarding the relation between religion and politics, and, in particular, between Christianity and Islam within the future Palestinian state. Although the history of the movement testified to an attempt to overcome sectarian and minority logic, the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence contained Koranic verses, although it underscored the overall laic character of the Palestinian political system and particularly of the PLO. 41 The proposal to assign a fixed number of seats to Christian deputies and the significance that was given to the second Intifada along with Hamas’ political discourse and its strong program of ‘Islamizing’ Palestinian society 42 seemed to reproduce some of the former logic, underlining possible issues of major controversy within the future Palestinian state and the concept of nationhood. Until the late 1970s, the Israeli government showed no interest in antagonising Christian Churches so as to avoid or discourage the creation of a united front against the state and the consolidation of any possible Christian-Muslim coalition. Moreover, Israel considered it of strategic importance to stabilize a cooperative relationship with Christian Churches in order to Sossie Andezian, ‘Palestiniens chrétiens et construction nationale’, Confluences Méditerranée, 3/66 (2008), p. 57. 41 Ibid., p. 67. 42 A. Omer, J. A. Springs, Religious Nationalism, p. 6. Micheline Ishay, ‘Globalization, Religion, and Nationalism in Israel and Palestine’, in Between Terror and Tolerance, Religious Leaders, Conflict, and Peacemaking, Ed. T. D. Sisk, (Baltimore, 2011), p. 80. 40

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acquire or lease their real estate in East and West Jerusalem. 43 This cooperative attitude, combined with the quiescent nature of the Christian presence in Israeli public life, defined the Christian communities’ boundaries and spheres. Among the established churches, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate showed more readiness to cooperate with the Israeli government. This gave the Patriarchate a valid support in countering the laity’s request to ‘Arabize’ its ecclesiastical and communal institution. At the same time, it corresponded to a strategic decision to avoid the ‘nationalization’ or ‘Palestinisation’ of church properties, preserving the Church from state pressure, whether Jordanian, Israeli or Palestinian. 44 The foundation of the state of Israel was, for the portion of the original Palestinian Arab population remaining within the new state’s boundaries, the beginning of an ‘existential’ dilemma of how to be citizens loyal to the state and at the same time remain true Arabs 45, or vice-versa, how to construe the significance of their religious affiliation in relation to their past and present sociopolitical condition. This great dilemma also concerned the sectarian logic behind the development of the state of Israel and how it defined the relationship between majority and minority within its political field. As a result, Israel’s Arabs have been mainly perceived as a potential threat and not as an ethnic minority whose rights deserve protection. 46 In fact, unlike Christian Churches and their institutions (which were recognised and allowed to develop their activities), individual Christian Arabs were not granted any preferential treatment and therefore experienced the same historical vicissitudes of Muslim Arabs. 47 This aspect shows the other facet of the dilemma experienced by Christian Arabs in M. Dumper, ‘Church-State Relation in Jerusalem since 1948’, in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner, Kevork Hintlian, (London, 1995), pp. 274–275. 44 Ibid., pp. 277–278. 45 Suhaila Haddad, Ronald D. McLaurin, Emile A. Nakhleh, ‘Minorities’, p. 97. 46 Ibid., p. 83. 47 Daphne Tsimhoni, ‘The Christian in Israel’, p. 127. 43

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Israel, which concerned not only how to reconcile their status as citizens of Israel with being Arab, but also with their being Christian and an integral part of a Palestinian community that, since the 1970s, was increasingly defined through the lens of Islam. Moreover, the growing prominence of Jewish religious mythology in relation to the foundation of the State of Israel, supported also by Western Christian messianic groups, redeployed such dilemmas within their religious dimension as well. To a large extent, the history of the Christian presence within Israel and Palestine as a whole is characterized by this dual dialectic dynamic. On the one hand, the established churches have been able to intervene with the authorities thanks to their extensive properties and land-holdings, and to the international support provided by the vast interest in the Holy Land. This made it possible to access the state and try to influence its decisions, especially if there were mutual interests. On the other, the local Christian Arab community, the smallest officially recognised religious group in Israel, tended to be marginalised and irrelevant to the state’s central and national priorities. 48 Further increased by their internal divisions into different denominations that are, in turn, fully recognized by the state, this marginalisation is a consequence of these dilemmas. Accordingly, Arab civic leaders and intellectuals have traditionally combated denominational fragmentation. Similarly, the Saint John’s Hospice episode, the first Intifada and the Oslo agreements suggested to religious leaders the need to overcome the narrow borders of their specific denominations (borders carefully defined since the mid-19th century) and to enter local public space and the political arena by organizing a number of ecumenical endeavours that sought to reconfigure the role and significance of ecclesiastical institutions and authorities within Israel and the PNA, and in relation to the image of the ‘Holy Land’.

48

Una McGahern, Palestinian Christians in Israel, p. 178.

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PATRIARCHAL RELIGIOUS LEADERSHIP WITHIN CONTEMPORARY ISRAEL AND PALESTINE

In order to analyse the contribution of Palestinian Christians’ reflection about the significance of their presence, role and condition within contemporary Israeli and Palestinian political fields, some basic understanding of the role of contemporary religious leadership is also necessary. In fact, a combined assessment of the historical development of Christian community boundaries and spheres with that of religious leadership is crucial to grasping the innovative content of Christian initiatives and exegetical and theological thinking during the 1990s, and their political contribution to developing a notion of citizenship, nation and state based on peace and justice within this context. Accordingly, this helps to set the framework from which religious leaders, and, in particular Sabbah, tried to emerge in order to address their understandings as spokespeople for all Palestinians and all of humankind. Dealing with the issue of the role and content of religious leadership, and, in particular Patriarchal authority, within contemporary Israel and Palestine presents an implicit complexity. In fact, a number of different factors (pertaining to the historical, ecclesiastical, demographical and, finally, political dimensions) have contributed to fragmenting and dividing Christian communities, determining local religious leadership profiles. Firstly, whereas within other contexts, such as Lebanon and Egypt, the Christian Church presence is comparatively less fragmented or, at least, clearly dominated by a single denomination that claims specific bonds with these territories, their history and heritage, the Christian community within this context is intrinsically multi-vocal and ecclesiastically fragmented. Considering only the established churches, in Jerusalem there are three Patriarchates (Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Latin), five archbishops (the Church of the East, Syrian Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox and Ethiopian) and two Reformed bishops (Anglican and Lutheran). 49 Anthony O’Mahony, Christianity and Jerusalem: studies in modern theology and politics in the Holy Land, (Leominster, 2009), p. VII. 49

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Moreover, this ecclesiastical presence has been essentially multiethnic and multi-national, like their dioceses, albeit the core component of the Christian faithful is Arab and Palestinian. Although testifying to the rich and multifaceted ecclesiastical, liturgical and theological Christian tradition, this condition has constantly posed a serious challenge to contemporary Christian communities. It fragments Christian positions towards the other religious communities (Judaism and Islam). And it makes it particularly difficult for Christian institutions to take a unified approach in discussions with local state authorities. At the same time, it is necessary to consider that each Christian denomination has its own particular ecclesiastical and hierarchical organization, distinguished also by the relationship between clergy and laity, and for the role of the latter within the church dimension. For example, being dominated by Greek-Cypriot clergy, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate has frequently shown only minimal interest in responding to the Arab Orthodox laity’s call to be directly and consistently involved in church management, which weakened its ability to perform the role of community exponent, especially from the perspective of its Palestinian faithful. This derived also from the high-ranking Greek clergy’s appeasing attitude towards local political authorities and its focus on Jerusalem in order to defend traditional Orthodox privileges and the Statu Quo within the Holy Land, preserving the Greekness of the Patriarchate. On the other hand, differently from Oriental Patriarchates, the Latin Patriarchate has never been able to act truly independently from the Vatican because it is hierarchically subordinate to the Pope, who appoints him. Moreover, the Latin Patriarch is under the authority of the Sacred Congregation for the Oriental Churches (located in Rome) and subordinate to the Apostolic Delegate. Indeed, his legal status is clearly restricted compared to Oriental Patriarchs and this has limited his role. 50 At the same time, since 1948 the Roman Catholic Church has found itself in the difficult position of reconciling the need to fend off charges of anti-Semitism and hostility towards Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Vatican, Jerusalem, the State of Israel, and Christianity in the Holy Land’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 5/2 (2005), p. 137. 50

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Israel with the need to defend the Palestinian Christian community, deprived of its rights. 51 Accordingly, the decision to Arabize the highest rank of the Patriarchate in the late 1980s contributed de facto to widening the manoeuvre room of this institution, making the Patriarch a sort of symbol for all Palestinian Christians during the 1990s. On top of this, Palestinian Christians have suffered from the tendency to look at this territory and its inhabitants mainly through the lens of the image of the Holy Land and the Statu Quo of its holy places. This has created a sort of paradox. Since the mid-19th century, the image of the Holy Land has increasingly attracted Western interest and the issue of the Statu Quo and its management has constantly absorbed the concerns of the established churches and their international networks, to the detriment of local Christians. It is true that these factors helped attract a number of different ecclesiastical institutions and religious organizations, and that this benefitted local Christian communities with numerous missionary establishments thanks to their educational and charitable work. But this attention did not counterbalance the eclipsing of local Christian communities, paradoxically resulting in veiling the political dimension of Christians or contributing to further encapsulating their presence within the sole dimension of the religious community. Secondly, to this should be added the marked demographic minority character of Palestinian Christians. In Israel, Christian communities amount to 2% of the total population (1.2% Catholic of various denominations, 0.4% Greek-Orthodox, 0.4% Protestant), representing 15% of the Palestinian population in the country. In the Palestinian National Authority, they comprise 2.4% of the population (0.4% Catholic, 0.6% Protestant, 1.2% GreekOrthodox). 52 Moreover, since the mid-20th century, the Christian presence in Palestine, both in Israel and in the West Bank-Gaza, has suffered declining demographical trends due to stable flows of emigration. On top of this, in 1948, with creation of the state of 51 52

A. Marchadour, D. Neuhaus, La terra, la Bibbia e la storia, p. 154. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/2151/

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Israel, 7% of the 714,000 Palestinians who became refugees were Christians. Finally, the recurring wars, shifting state boundaries and changes in the ruling political authorities further weakened the Christian presence, frequently putting Christian religious leadership in the difficult position of mediating on behalf of their faithful in the midst of conflicts and with a number of different political and state authorities. Furthermore, the fact that Palestinian Christians lived under different political systems and balances of power (Israeli, Jordanian-West Bank, Egyptian-Gaza, then Israeli occupation until Oslo, later on between Israel, the PNA and Hamas) is another element of complexity. All these factors, to which should be added the specific character of Christian community boundaries and spheres previously described, contributed to reinforcing the dominion of each religious leadership within its respective constituency. Thanks to the monopoly created by law, the recognition and institutionalization of the religious communities favoured the consolidation of the role of the church and its supreme guide as civil exponent of their faithful within the civic sphere. 53 Religious leaders benefitted from the relationship with the state and from the international networks to which they refer, securing their position as civil heads of their community and obtaining symbolic and material resources to further reinforce their role of representative, mediator and service supplier to a community fragmented and structurally in crisis. 54 Moreover, the fact that Palestinian Christians are an indigenous minority within fields, both Israeli and Palestinian, dominated by other religions (Judaism and Islam) accentuated the role of the Church in supporting, defending and representing the community in everyday life, locally and abroad. This makes the Patriarch the sole and ideal spokesperson of his community, the father of the flock, symbol of faith and figurehead of the community within both religious and political spaces. Of course, it should not be denied, as pointed out in the previous Fiona McCallum, Christian Religious Leadership in Middle East: The Political Role of the Patriarch, (Mellen, 2010), pp. 2–3. 54 Ibid., p. 209. 53

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paragraph, that this role has never been undisputed. Part of the Palestinian Christian community perceived secular leaders and parties as more apt to realize their aspirations and needs. At the same time, the Patriarch’s ability to defend his community greatly depended on his relation with the state power, setting a precise limit to his civil role. Moreover, ecclesiastical and demographical fragmentation, to which should be added the competition between the established churches (especially in the past), the transnational character of their dioceses and the fact that, until the 1980s, most of all higher ranks were ethnically non-Arab, prevented the church from overcoming specific community boundaries and in some cases, as in the Greek Orthodox, religious leaders have been disputed in their role of representative by the laity. In this regard, religious leadership has long been enclosed within the realm of specific faiths. Consequently, during most of the 20th century none of the churches or their religious leaders was able to transform Christian religious space into a political space fully integrated with Palestinian aspirations and national projects. However, this does not mean that the Christian laity has been totally excluded from the political field, strictly encapsulated within solely community boundaries along with their religious leaderships. Quite the contrary, their position of marginalization afforded them, paradoxically, certain dynamism in participating in and contributing to Arab, Palestinian nationalist and Marxist movements. Similarly, although all these factors fostered division and fragmentation within the Palestinian Christian presence, because the Latin and Greek Orthodox patriarchates and the Protestant Episcopate of Jerusalem entirely cover Palestinian territory, they were able to provide a certain sense of identity regarding the idea of the country as a sole unit with a special and holy significance, even when administrative and political division changed. 55 The 1970s could be considered a turning point. As secular parties and movements experienced crises, new political projects Leonard Marsh, ‘Palestinian Christians: Theology and Politics in the Holy Land’, in Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics, Ed. Anthony O’Mahony, (London, 2008), p. 206. 55

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began to simultaneously develop, proposing to publicly revive the role of religion in politics both in Israel and Palestine. This contributed to worsening the condition of the Christians, who became dramatically irrelevant for the state and main political actors, especially within Israel. 56 This situation fostered the need to reconsider the Christian position; a course that also benefitted from the commitment of religious leaders who underwent a process of spiritual and ecclesiastical renewal that led to the ecumenical initiatives organized during the 1990s, overcoming religious community boundaries to enter public political and national local spaces. It was exactly during this decade that Christian Churches were progressively involved in the process of inscribing their presence within the Palestinian state-building process, taking part in a dual dynamic where the ‘religious’ contemporarily engaged with and was engaged by politics. 57

TOWARD A ‘NEW’ PUBLIC SELF-AWARENESS OF BELONGING TO PALESTINE: MICHEL SABBAH AND THE 1990S

Born in Nazareth in 1933 during the British Mandate and ordained in his hometown in 1955, Michel Sabbah devoted his life to pastoral activities and teaching, as diocesan youth director, director of education and, finally, president of Bethlehem University until being appointed Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem by Pope John Paul II in 1987. 58 His appointment represented a sort of history within history, exerting practical and symbolical influence within the Catholic, Christian and Palestinian dimensions. As the first Arab Patriarch in the history of Roman Catholicism within the Holy Land since the Latin Patriarchate was revived in 1847, Michel Sabbah fulfilled the long desired aspiration of Latin Catholics to have an Arab minister as the head of their local Church. The Una McGahern, Palestinian Christians in Israel, p. 148. Sossie Andezian, ‘Palestinens Chrétiens’, p. 8. 58 Drew Cristiansen, Saliba Sarsar (eds.), Patriarch Michel Sabbah. Faithful Witness. On Reconciliation and Peace in the Holy Land. Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, (New City Press, 2009), p. 12. 56 57

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tradition of Italian patriarchs was considered at that time quite anachronistic. Although it had allowed the Catholic Church to mediate between different political authorities (Israel, Jordan and the Occupied Territories) without being involved in an open conflict with them, this tradition had increased the marginalisation of Palestinian Christians’ interests, in particular given the fact that the Apostolic Delegate, on which this institution depends, approached the Arab-Israeli conflict with a totally different attitude from that desired by local Roman Catholics. In fact, a non-Arab Patriarch was neither able nor in a position to concretely counterbalance this stance. 59 Indeed, Michel Sabbah’s appointment was highly symbolic. Albeit still subject to the same hierarchical system, he was able to overcome all the traditional community boundaries and limits, presenting himself as a religious leader for all the Palestinian Christians, overcoming the narrow dimension of the Latin denomination as well as a spokesperson addressing the rights of the entire Palestinian nation. 60 Moreover, his appointment was extremely timely, providing local Palestinian Catholics and Christians with a guide and pastor from their land who had experienced all the hardships and contradictions of the 20th century, in a period of great political fervour between hopes and continuous trials, developing his leadership during two Intifadas and the signing of the Oslo Accords. After 1988, he adopted a very firm line on the Palestinian question. Exerting considerable influence on the political attitude of the Patriarchal institution, he became the voice representing Palestinian Christianity in Jerusalem, whereas neither the Greek nor the Armenian Patriarchate would have been able to embody such a vocation. 61 Moreover, presiding over the Conference of Latin Bishops in the Arab Regions (Conférence des Evêques Latins dans 59

p. 139.

Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Vatican, Jerusalem, the State of Israel’,

Drew Chrsitiansen, ‘The Intifada and the Palestinian Christian Identity’, in Christianity and Jerusalem. Studies in Modern Theology and Politics in the Holy Land, Ed. Anthony O’Mahony, (London/Leominster, 2010), p. 45. 61 Ibid., p. 136. 60

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les Régions Arabes – CELRA) and the Order of the Knighthood of the Holy Sepulchre, he was able to bring the voice of local Christians and their needs to regional and international levels, increasing his authority and status. He expressed his commitment and dedication to Palestine, strenuously advocating peace, justice and the rights of Palestinians with the power of his reflections and performing symbolic and concrete acts. This is clearly testified to by the number of his pastoral letters, as well as by the limitation of his formal contacts with Israeli authorities and the abolition of all ceremonies associated with religious feast days (except for those liturgically set) during the Intifada, 62 and the ascription of the celebration of Christmas in Bethlehem as a symbol of the fulfilment of Palestinian national aspirations after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. 63 Precisely in 1987, during the first year of the Intifada, when the Palestinian Christians were very active in the popular uprising, Sabbah was appointed Patriarch, taking office in 1988. While the Christians of Beit Sahour were becoming an emblem of the revolt against the new tax system imposed by the Israeli government within the occupied territories, Sabbah issued his first Pastoral letter (in August 1988). 64 In this document, Sabbah focused on the importance of dialogue, mutual recognition and the role of the Christian minority and clerics within the land of Palestine, calling on both lay people and the religious to assume their responsibility, to ‘bear witness’ and exert ‘constructive service and collaboration’ and not to ‘run away’. 65 This was the necessary prelude to promoting an effective and concrete commitment of Palestinian Christians to public society and to local politics, relinquishing the tendency to take refuge within the community dimension. Accordingly, whatever the entangled relationship between religion Anthony O’Mahony, ‘The Vatican, Jerusalem, the State of Israel’, pp. 139–140. 63 Sossie Andezian, ‘Palestinens Chrétiens’, p. 8. 64 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1988/ in-pulcritudinis-pacis-en.html 65 Drew Cristiansen, Saliba Sarsar (eds.), Patriarch Michel Sabbah. Faithful Witness, pp. 80–81. 62

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and politics in the Israeli-Palestinian question, Sabbah expressed the duty and the right of each religious leader to foster dialogue and interchange starting from the religious dimension to engage with politics, whenever human rights and dignity were violated and ignored. 66 Although Sabbah frequently reiterated his refusal to be associated with politics, he wholly embraced the affirmation of Vatican II that the Church ‘has the right to pass moral judgements, even on matters touching the political order […] including question of war and peace and brotherly relations among people’. 67 He adopted this principle and duty, contextualizing it within Palestine in order to assert the rights of the Palestinian nation and to contribute to the development of a balanced and inclusive notion of both Palestinian nation and Israeli state, where Palestinian Christians would be full citizens with equal rights, combating any form of political manipulation of religion. It is from this position that is necessary to understand his political role and impact during the 1990s, especially regarding the dynamic of engagement between religion and politics and the connection between the ideals of justice and peace, and between national and religious emancipation. Sabbah developed his thinking within his numerous pastoral letters and statements, particularly with ‘Pray for Peace in Jerusalem’ (1990 Pentecost), 68 ‘Reading the Bible Today In the Land of the Bible’ (November 1993) 69 and, finally, ‘Seek Peace and Pursue It’ (Ps 34: 14 in September 1998). 70 These documents offer a clear picture of Sabbah’s understanding of his people, the role of Palestinian Christian community, the relationship between politics Yves Teyssier D’Orfeuil, Michael Sabbah. Paix sur Jérusalem. Propos d’un évêque palestinien (Paris, 2002), p. 79. 67 Gaudium et Spes 76, 5. See also Drew Cristiansen, Saliba Sarsar (eds), Patriarch Michel Sabbah. Faithful Witness, p. 14. 68 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1990/ prayforpeace.html 69 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoralletters/1993/ readingthebible_en.html 70 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoralletters/1998/ seek_the_peace1998_en.html 66

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and religion in this land and, finally, the role of the religious leader beyond the demographics that his flock might suggest. In the pastoral letter ‘Pray for Peace in Jerusalem’, Sabbah offers significant thought about the meaning of and reason for the Intifada and the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, stressing, ‘there is then one land, with two confronting histories, peoples and cultures. There are two outlooks, several ideologies and so many prejudices. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two situations. One nationalism has already created the state of Israel, Palestinian nationalism is still struggling to establish its own’ (35). 71 Insisting on the need for mutual reconciliation, dialogue, justice and peace, Sabbah openly pointed out that ‘an occupied people has the right to claim its rights and to organise itself politically in the way it sees fit, in the way it has already expressed: that is, as an independent state. This is a right of natural law, and no one can take this right away’ (54). 72 Then he proceeded to ask Palestinian Christians to recognize that they are ‘firmly rooted in your Church and your homeland’, exhorting them to ‘be increasingly involved in all spheres of public life, in order to build the society of tomorrow and foster fraternity and freedom in co-operation with believers of other religions’. It is within this dynamic of self-awareness, recognition and commitment to the other, recognising all the difficulties and complexities of this commitment, that is necessary to frame society and therefore an inclusive socio-political space and nation. Indeed, theological and religious reflection is the means to pursue peace, justice and liberation, leaving to the political actors the task of concretely dealing with the state-building process and the functioning of the state. But this promotion of division of roles did not imply a separation between religion and politics. Quite the contrary: it is recognition of a unique responsibility and mutual commitment between these two spheres. Accordingly, Sabbah urged Palestinian Christians to be the leading actors of a dialogue that needs to http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1990/ prayforpeace.html 72 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1990/ prayforpeace.html 71

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embrace and reflect the complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian question. A dialogue that should develop from Palestinian Christians’ understanding of their role as a minority, their connection to the history of this land, the relationship between political aspirations and theological and religious traditions within this space and the need to establish a stable and fruitful continuous interchange between Christians (of different affiliations), Jews and Muslims. Following this path, in November 1993 Sabbah wrote one of his most important pastoral letters under the title ‘Reading the Bible Today in the Land of the Bible’. 73 The focus of the letter was clearly the Bible and ‘the way to read and understand it, in order to make it the object of meditation and prayer’ (2). 74 In particular, this pastoral letter stressed the importance of Bible criticism and the meaning and the value of the Bible for each Christian, within and outside Palestine. Adopting the message of Vatican II, Sabbah presents the Bible as a matter of ‘progressive revelation’, 75 focusing on contextualizing the teaching of Dei verbum and Nostra aetate within Palestinian reality. 76 Accordingly, the Patriarch concentrated on the questions that reading the Bible raises for contemporary Palestinians. In fact, he analysed the relationship between ‘ancient Biblical history and our contemporary history’ (7). 77 Sabbah interrogates his readers from different perspectives, both theological and political. The purpose is to neutralise manipulation of the Word of God. He did not limit his analyses to the dimension http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1993/ readingthebible_en.html 74 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1993/ readingthebible_en.html 75 Leonard Marsh, ‘The Theological Thought of Michel Sabbah in the context of the Challenges to the Christian presence in the Holy Land’, in The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East, Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, John Flannery (London, 2010), p. 254. 76 Jamal Khader, David Neuhaus, ‘Le Dialogue Interreligeux en Terre Sainte quarante ans après Nostra Aetate’, Proche-Orient chrétien, 56/3– 4 (2006), p. 300. 77 Ibid. 73

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of Christianity and Judaism, but dealt also with the relationship between the former and Islam, in what can be considered an intraPalestinian dimension. The Patriarch, in fact, underlines that ‘Christianity, and Islam, are in agreement, even if each one has its own interpretation of the Revelation. For each of them, the Bible or the Koran is the book of God. […] The Word of God should be above every human conflict. It cannot foster a conflict between peoples or individuals. On the contrary, the message of salvation is to be found in it, even in our present situation of conflict. In it must be seen the one and only God, who commands all believers despite their different religions to practice justice, love, forgiveness and reconciliation’ (57). 78 According to him, it is from this understanding – considering that both Christians and Muslims are undoubtedly part of the same homeland and nation – that the future Palestinian political field should develop. Moreover, Sabbah stressed, ‘to accept the Bible and believe in it does not mean that God is one’s adversary, supporting the opposing side. On the contrary, to believe in it is an invitation to both sides who believe in it to see God inviting both of them to grant each other justice and reconciliation. In the present circumstances, the Bible is a word of God, a word of justice and forgiveness directed to the two peoples, the Palestinians and the Jews’ (57). 79 Indeed, ‘Reading the Bible Today in the Land of the Bible’ strongly revealed the blind spot in developing political approaches that politicize religion, and vice versa, in an exclusivist manner. This is particularly true in relation to religious Zionism, which strongly confronts the local church and the relationship between Palestinian Christians and the Bible’s message. In this guise, the advent of religious Zionism, and especially the increasing recourse to religion to orient and give significance to a precise political agenda, made the Old Testament a political text that poses serious questions regarding the connection between the Old and New Testaments and theirs to the living Christian community of Palestine as both citizens of Israel and practitioners of their faith. 80 Ibid. Ibid. 80 Leonard Marsh, ‘Palestinian Christian Theology’, p. 109. 78 79

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From these concerns, he developed a theology with immediate political implications that had its raison d’être not just because it emerged in a particular context of deprivation or oppression but also because it pursued its mission in confronting a pervasive theological tradition supporting a distinct political dynamic. 81 In his commitment, Sabbah developed a counter-political theology. It is this aspect that constitutes its local attributes, establishing a direct connection with the dimension of politics, state and nation both in Israel and Palestine. In 1998, Sabbah issued his fifth pastoral letter ‘Seek Peace and Pursue It’ (Ps 34: 14). After many hopes, during that year the political situation was very tense and the peace process appeared already blocked, despite the 1991 Madrid Conference, the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Fundamental Agreement between the Holy See and the State of Israel (also in 1993), the 1994 peace treaty between Jordan and Israel and the proclamation of the Palestinian National Authority in 1994. Among the reasons for the significance of this letter, was its core purpose to reconsider and analyse all the unresolved issues that were still feeding the conflict within the Holy Land, fostering the unceasing growth of religious extremism. Without ignoring that the recourse to violence is only possible as extrema ratio to end ‘clear and prolonged tyranny’ (16), 82 a legitimate defence of human dignity and rights, Sabbah directly attacked any form of terrorism or abuse of force. But it is again religion and its connection with politics that gives sense to his reflection. Sabbah pointed out that ‘religious leaders can have a decisive influence on the faithful of one side as well as the other. They can incite the people to war and to violence, or invite them to peace’ (21). 83 Accordingly, ‘religion is sometimes turned into religious extremism and a call to violence, even terrorism, in the defence of cultural or national identity. It sometimes happens that politicians exploit one Leonard Marsh, ‘Palestinian Christians’, p. 88. http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1998/ seek_the_peace1998_en.html 83 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1998/ seek_the_peace1998_en.html 81 82

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particular aspect of religion for their own ends’ (21). 84 Pointing out that ‘religious extremism changes religion into a particular and exclusive absolute; it is replacing God by one’s self as an individual or people’ (22), Michel Sabbah focused on the manipulation of religion by politics, calling for responsible religious engagement able to pursue peace and justice without ignoring the difficulty of forgiveness, to reach mutual security as the result of Israeli recognition of Palestinians’ ‘full freedom of self-determination to choose the form of political life they desire, including establishing their own independent state’ (39). 85 Indeed, against any form of discriminating nationalism or oppressive political agenda, Sabbah called for the foundation of an Israeli and Palestinian socio-political field on the basis of ‘equality for its citizens with their rights and duties so that no one is superior to anyone else, and no one subject to another or in need of protection from others. All of them are equal and all are equally protected by the laws’ (41). 86 A ‘reformed’ ideal of national belonging that emerged from a revived and contextualized understanding of the word of God, where the strenuous respect of the principles of peace, justice and mutual recognition can contribute to positively reconciling and integrating religion and nationalism. And so, overcoming the traditionally ‘neutral’ attitude of local churches in the Holy Land, Sabbah offered a proactive and engaged reflection about religious traditions, helping to frame a more inclusive understanding of God and the Bible, especially the Old Testament, strongly contextualizing his testimony and reflection within the Palestinian nation and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, recomposing the universal and the local by addressing issues of peace, non-violence, reconciliation and mutual recognition. He exposed the discrimination of the state and denounced the rhetoric of both Christian and Jewish http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1998/ seek_the_peace1998_en.html 85 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1998/ seek_the_peace1998_en.html 86 http://www.lpj.org/newsite2006/patriarch/pastoral-letters/1998/ seek_the_peace1998_en.html 84

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fundamentalists who supported the occupation on the basis of holy texts, paving the way for the definition of an inclusive concept of nation and state where Christians would be fully integrated with equal rights and duties, going beyond the longstanding community borders and spheres that for decades have encapsulated Christian religious leadership within the Holy Land. 87

CONCLUSION

Five years before his farewell to the Patriarchal office and two years from the beginning of the Second Intifada, Sabbah made a speech titled ‘Perspective of a Future Peace between Israeli and Palestinian’ at Pax Christi USA (May 30, 2003). 88 Bringing his concerns and reflections on Palestine and its inhabitants to the international stage, Sabbah reconsidered the conflict in all its implications, pointing out that ‘the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is essentially a political one, between two peoples on a nationalistic basis’. At the same time, the Patriarch immediately focused on the religious connotations of the conflict ‘as both peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, refer in this conflict to their religious memories and to their holy places’, underlining that ‘this conflict has also a Christian aspect, because it is in and around the places where Christianity started. This conflict is also and mainly a direct threat to the survival of the small Christian community of these holy places.’ Through these words, Sabbah clearly exemplified the significance of overcoming the boundaries of the community and the role of ‘ethnarch’, 89 avoiding dealing with Naim Ateek, ‘Who is the Church? A Christian Theology for the Holy Land’, in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land. Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner, Kevork Hintlian (London, 1995), p. 319. 88 Drew Cristiansen, Saliba Sarsar (eds.), Patriarch Michel Sabbah. Faithful Witness, 142. See also: http://www.hcef.org/publications/hcefnews/1097-perspectives-of-a-future-peace-between-israelis-andpalestinians. 89 Ethnarch is a neologism conceived to describe the past outlook of Patriarchs’ involvement in politics and society as representative of their community. This is explained in the first paragraph of the chapter. Drew Chrsitiansen, ‘The Intifada and the Palestinian Christian Identity’, p. 45. 87

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political authorities on behalf of a separate community and denomination making special arrangements in the interests of a specific congregation. Sabbah focused on speaking as churchman for all Palestinians and humankind, placing the values of reconciliation, mutual recognition, justice and peace at the core of his patriarchal ministry. The boundaries described before as well as the traditional role of religious leadership is totally overcome in favour of a contextualized and progressive approach that embraces all the aspects and people involved in the still-unresolved IsraeliPalestinian question. The recognition of the weakness of the Christian position does not lead to a defence of a minority status. This position was particularly important because it did not develop in a vacuum. Quite the contrary, it was fully integrated into the wider ecumenical movement resulting from the first Intifada, which saw established churches setting aside their traditional rivalries in a series of joint initiatives. This was an unprecedented move that brought the church from the margins of Israeli and Palestinian societies into public life. At the same time, this religious engagement proposed a serious reconfiguration of the relationship between the universal and local mission of the church within Palestine, reconciling these two dimensions. From this position, Sabbah developed his theological reflection, underlining the risks of the overlapping between religion and politics, especially when the latter manipulates the former, leading to exclusionist programmes that create social segregation. In doing this, Sabbah repeatedly emphasized the need to unveil such negative intertwining, understanding the true message of God preserved in the holy texts for the benefit of Palestinians, Israelis and all of humankind on behalf of justice, peace and human rights. However, this did not mean the withdrawal of religion from political space, or its simple separation from it. The solution of the overlapping between religion and nationalism is not in the ‘removal’ of one of these dimensions and affiliations, or the simple separation between them that can result in an aesthetic occultation rather than a solution. Quite the contrary, it is by revealing and combating all possible narrow manipulations, understanding the mechanics of the conflict, that a sort of inclusive ‘religious nationalism’, an expression of the aspiration of both Israeli and Palestinian people, can be developed.

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Sabbah refused the idea that religion must be relegated to the private sphere and kept out of political life. Instead, he urged developing a new public ethnic and socio-political engagement on the basis of the religious message, fostering dialogue and mutual recognition in order to reach both a political solution to the Palestinian plight and the development of an inclusive Palestinian nation and state. He espoused a form of religious patriotism and nationalism based on a conviction of the distinct mission and responsibility of Palestinian (contextual) Christians within the PNA and conflict resolution. Accordingly, while his message, along with that of the creators of a Palestinian liberation (contextual) theology, never overcame the limits of elite intellectual movements, it succeeded in highlighting the logic and implications of the growing relationship between religion, politics and nationalism within Israel and Palestine. Indeed, understanding that religion is not just an abstract idea and belief, Sabbah took up this challenge by directly confronting these dynamics, reconfiguring the role of religion and its relationship with politics and nationalism beyond the understanding that this relationship could only lead to anti-modern, parochial and thus violent positions. Therefore, the experience of Sabbah during the 1990s testified to the possibility of articulating a self-critical interpretation of religion and politics. In his pastoral letters, he tried to offer a way to reconcile the universal aspiration of Christianity with the needs of a specific Palestinian community, giving voice to national pride based on a new theological understanding of its history, role and presence, encompassing justice, peace and belonging to a specific territory and homeland, taking a stand against discrimination and any abuses of power.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kamal Abdulfattah, ‘The Geographical Distribution of the Palestinians on Both Sides of the 1949 Armistice Line’, in Palestinians over the Green Line, Ed. Alexaner Schölch, (London, 1983). Sossie Andezian, ‘Palestiniens chrétiens et construction nationale’, Confluences Méditerranée, 3/66 (2008). ———, Le sacré à l’épreuve du politique. Noël à Bethléem, (Paris, 2011). Naim Ateek, ‘Who is the Church? A Christian Theology for the Holy Land’, in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, Eds.

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Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner, Kevork Hintlian, (London, 1995). Helga Baumgarten, ‘Politicization of Muslim-Christian Relations in the Palestinian National Movement’, in Islam, Judaism, and the Political Role of Religions in the Middle East, Ed. John Bunzl, (Florida, 2004). Helen Bryer, ‘Arab Orthodox Christians of Jerusalem and Palestine in the Inter-war Period: a Study in Religious and Political Identity and Church-State Relations’, in Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics, Ed. Anthony O’Mahony, (London, 2008). Drew Christiansen, ‘The Intifada and the Palestinian Christian Identity’, in Christianity and Jerusalem. Studies in Modern Theology and Politics in the Holy Land, Ed. Anthony O’Mahony, (London/Leominster, 2010). Drew Christiansen, Saliba Sarsar (eds.), Patriarch Michel Sabbah. Faithful Witness. On Reconciliation and Peace in the Holy Land. Holy Land Christian Ecumenical Foundation, (New City Press, 2009). Yves Teyssier D’Orfeuil, Michael Sabbah. Paix sur Jérusalem. Propos d’un évêque palestinien, (Paris, 2002). Elena Dodge, Jordan First: a History of the Intellectual and Political Economy of Jordanian Antiquity, (Chicago, 2009). Michael Dumper, ‘Church-State Relation in Jerusalem since 1948’, in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner, Kevork Hintlian, (London, 1995). ———, ‘The Christian Churches of Jerusalem in the Post-Oslo Period’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 31/2, Winter (2002). ———, The Politics of Sacred Space: The Old City of Jerusalem in the Middle East Conflict, (London, 2002). Suhaila Haddad, Ronald D. McLaurin, Emile A. Nakhleh, ‘Minorities in Containment: The Arabs of Israel’, in The Political Role of Minority Groups in the Middle East, Ed. Ronald D. McLaurin, (New York, 1979). Noah Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine. Communalism and Nationalism, 1917–1948, (Edinburgh, 2013). Meir Hatina, ‘Hamas and the Oslo accords: Religious dogma in a changing political reality’, Mediterranean Politics, 4/3 (1999).

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Micheline Ishay, ‘Globalization, Religion, and Nationalism in Israel and Palestine’, in Between Terror and Tolerance, Religious Leaders, Conflict, and Peacemaking, Ed. T. D. Sisk, (Baltimore, 2011). Najla Kassab, ‘A Middle Eastern Christian Approach to the Old Testament’, NEST Theological Review, 13 (1992). Jamal Khader, David Neuhaus, ‘Le Dialogue Interreligeux en Terre Sainte quarante ans après Nostra Aetate’, Proche-Orient chrétien, 56/3–4 (2006). George S. Khoury, ‘The Social Role of Arab Christians in Israel, Jordan and Palestine’, Al Liqa’ Journal, 6 (1996). Orly Levy, Erik Cohen, ‘The Occupation By Jews Of St. John’s Hospice In The Old City Of Jerusalem: An Analysis Of An Iconic Event’, in Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, 26/2, Summer (1997). Paolo Maggiolini, ‘The Influence of Latin-Melkite Relations in the Land of Transjordan From the Rebirth of the Latin Patriarchate to the Foundation of the Archdiocese of Petra and Philadelphia (1866–1932)’, Living Stones Yearbook, The Living Stones of the Holy Land Trust (2012). Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon, (Berkeley, 2000). Alain Marchadour, Neuhaus David, La Terra, la Bibbia e la Storia, (Milano, 2007). Leonard Marsh, ‘Palestinian Christian Theology as a New and Contemporary Expression of Eastern Christian Thought’, Living Stones Yearbook, The Living Stones of the Holy Land Trust (2012). ———, ‘Palestinian Christians: Theology and Politics in the Holy Land’, in Christianity in the Middle East: Studies in Modern History, Theology and Politics, Ed. Anthony O’Mahony, (London, 2008). ———, ‘The Theological Thought of Michel Sabbah in the context of the Challenges to the Christian presence in the Holy Land’, in The Catholic Church in the Contemporary Middle East, Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, John Flannery, (London, 2010). Fiona McCallum, Christian Religious Leadership in Middle East: The Political Role of the Patriarch, (Mellen, 2010).

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Una McGahern, Palestinian Christians in Israel: State attitudes towards non-Muslims in a Jewish state, (London & New York, 2011). Anthony O’Mahony (ed.), Christianity and Jerusalem: studies in modern theology and politics in the Holy Land (Leominster, 2009). ——— (ed.), Palestinian Christians: Religion, Politics and Society in the Holy Land, (London, 1999). ———, ‘The Religious, Political and Social Status of the Christian Communities in Palestine, 1800–1930’, in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner, Kevork Hintlian, (London, 1995). ———, ‘The Vatican, Jerusalem, the State of Israel, and Christianity in the Holy Land’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 5, 2 (2005). Atalia Omer, Jason A. Springs, Religious Nationalism: A Reference Handbook, (Santa Barbara, 2013). Paolo Pieraccini, ‘Il Patriarcato latino di Gerusalemme (1918– 1940). Ritratto di un patriarca scomodo: mons. Luigi Barlassina’, Il Politico, LXIII, n. 4 (1998). Micael P. Prior, ‘You Will be my Witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the Ends of the Earth. A Christian Perspective on Jerusalem’, in Palestinian Christians: Religion, Politics and Society in the Holy Land, Ed. Anthony O’Mahony, (London, 1999). Laura Robson, Colonialism and Christianity in Mandate Palestine, (Austin, 2011). Shomali Qustandi, ‘Palestinian Christians: Politics, Press and Religious Identity 1900–1948’, in The Christian Heritage in the Holy Land, Eds. Anthony O’Mahony, Göran Gunner and Kevork Hintlian, (London, 1995). Timothy D. Sisk (ed.), Between Terror and Tolerance, Religious Leaders, Conflict, and Peacemaking, (Baltimore, 2011). Tristan Sturm, Seth Frantzman, ‘Religious geopolitics of Palestinian Christianity: Palestinian Christian Zionists, Palestinian Liberation Theologists, and American Missions to Palestine’, Middle Eastern Studies, 51/3 (2015). Daphne Tsimhoni, Christian Communities in Jerusalem and the West Bank Since 1948: An Historical, Social, and Political Study,

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(Westport, 1993). Reinhard Winter, ‘Back to Square One: A study in the Reemergence of the Palestinian Identity in the West Bank 1967– 1980’, in Palestinians over the Green Line, Ed. Alexaner Schölch, (London, 1983). Oren Yiftachel, ‘‘Ethnocracy’. The Politics of Judaizing Israel/Palestine’, in Across the Wall: Narratives of IsraelPalestinian History, Eds. I. Pappé, J. Hilal, (London, 2010).

6. ‘UNDER THE SAME FLAG’: THE COPTS OF EGYPT AND THE CHALLENGES OF NASSERIST NATIONALISM ALESSIA MELCANGI 1 INTRODUCTION

In an analysis of the policies carried out by the presidents of the Egyptian Republic and their government, political and ideological factors (such as socialism and Arab nationalism) seem to be of fundamental importance. At the same time, ideological and religious factors play a relevant role in shaping the identity of the country: they have an impact on the different components of Egyptian society and on interfaith relations between the two largest religious groups of the country, the Copts and the Muslims. In the case specifically examined here, that of Republican Egypt ruled firstly by General Muhammad Najib (1952–1954) and then by the raʾis Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser (1954–1970), the Coptic community was exposed to the effects of the prevailing nationalist ideology and the new leadership’s political programme. During the 1950s and the 1960s, the Christian Copts, who at the time represented about 7.3% of the total population of 26

Dr. Alessia Melcangi is a Research Fellow at the Center of Research on the Southern System and the Wider Mediterranean (CRiSSMA), Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milan. 1

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million 2, faced many challenges arising from Nasser’s nationalist ideology. In fact, in those years the governments in power carried out different policies, which, in addition to striking at the old regime and the elites who supported it, weakened the Coptic community in the spheres of political, economic, legal and social participation. From the land reform of 1952 to the law of suppression of the religious courts of 1955, to the nationalizations of 1957 and 1960, the Coptic community suffered a serious loss of prestige, while their participation in state administration was restricted. However, the reforms of the 1950s were not aimed at increasing sectarian strife between Copts and Muslims, or to protect the interests and traditions of one group at the expense of another: they rather fell within the political and economic program of the revolutionary group personified by Nasser, who wanted to centralize power and control of society in the hands of the new state, depriving the old political leadership of its authority. Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, leader of the movement and president of the Republic of Egypt since 1956, became the spokesman of a political programme that marked a definitive break with the previous liberal regime, a break that was not merely institutional in nature. Focusing attention on public and national problems, the raʾis tried to reduce sectarian conflict by integrating the Coptic community within the new state, as he envisioned it. The relationship between the Christian community and the state (still defined through its Muslim identity) took on a distinctive nature in the first republican period, between 1952 and 1970, when the Coptic community once again found a politically active role after the emergence of the Islamic movement in the 1930s had gradually forced it into self-imposed retreat. A so-called ‘period of rebirth’ seemed to dissolve religious differences in the affirmation This is the percentage recorded in the official census of 1960, the first conducted after the 1952 Revolution. See Anthony O’Mahony, Emma Loosley (eds.), Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East, (London, 2010), p. 61; Brigitte Voile, ‘Cyrille VI et Nasser: le face-à-face du saint et du héros, 1959–1970’, in Saints et héros du Moyen-Orient contemporain, Ed. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, (Paris, 2002), p. 161. 2

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of national unity in the early twentieth century, when Christians and Muslims of Egypt marched together in the common struggle for liberation from British control and for the affirmation of independence. Under the new project of reconfiguration of state and society, the Coptic community, made up of various groups and factions with different objectives, was integrated into a new community, one of whose main pillars was the appeal to the nation. In the face of new external enemies, such as Zionism and the State of Israel (but also old antagonists, such as the resurgent French-British imperialism at the time of the Suez crisis in 1956) a national spirit was nurtured and internal religious conflicts became of secondary importance. The Copts sided fully with the Nasser regime at the time of the Suez War and they supported the policies of the raʾīs in a changed international context, where the movement of nonaligned countries played an important role. The Copts recognized also the validity of the new social reforms promoted by the regime, which in various ways affected the members of the Christian community. It is difficult however to affirm with precision if some socialist measures, such as land reform and the limitation of land ownership were applied to Copts in a discriminatory way, compared with other wealthy groups in Egyptian society. During 1960, the Egyptian government implemented a policy of openness toward the Coptic Church, permitting it an element of liturgical and ceremonial visibility. The political convergence achieved between the Egyptian President and the head of the Coptic Church, Patriarch Kyrollos VI, fostered the transformation of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, formerly the centre of a transnational church, including the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, into the Egyptian national church. The most recent research insists on the relevance of a close alliance between the Patriarchate of Alexandria and the regime, collaboration that found one of its most obvious manifestations in the promotion by the media of the friendship born between Nasser and Kyrollos. The relationship was based on mutual interests, as on the one hand the regime gained the support of the Christian population for its policies, which underlined national unity by minimizing sectarian divisions; on the other hand, the community obtained more representation in political and administrative bodies, as well as the recognition of rights to worship that had been previously limited or infringed.

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Through a collection of archival data, an analysis of several newspaper articles and a study of the literature, the present study attempts to shed light on the role played by nationalism and religion within the political realm of the Republican Egypt in its initial period, showing how the Copts reshaped their self-image towards an acceptable national identity. Specifically, I will analyze the interaction of nationalism and religion, and its effects on the structures of the governance, starting with the case study of the Coptic community, considered not as a monolithic social block but taking account of the varied composition of the Coptic community and intra-communal cleavages and factionalism.

DIN WA WATANIYA: RELIGION AND NATIONALISM IN THE EGYPT OF GAMAL ‘ABD AL-NASSER

In an overnight coup from 22 to 23 July 1952, the Free Officers deposed the last descendant of the royal dynasty that had governed Egypt, and established the Republic. This date marked the beginning of a new phase of institutional and governmental change affecting Egyptian society as a whole. The main slogans promoted by the new establishment explicitly favoured the downtrodden stratas of the population, and promoted the abolition of the symbols of political institutions of the ancien régime, as well as the use of the idea of the Egyptian nation as a bulwark against foreign domination. Nationalism, national unity and Egyptian socialism became the watchwords of change. The rooting of Egyptian national ideology in the soil of Egypt has distant origins: 3 Egyptian nationalism at its origin assumed territorial characteristics, firmly tying its development to the construction of a centralized state independent of the Ottoman Empire, thanks to the policies carried out by Muhammad ‘Ali at the beginning of the nineteenth century. These policies led to the emergence of the modern state. On the origin of Egyptian nationalism see Israel Gershoni, James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: The Ssearch for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930, (New York, 1986); Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, (Cambridge, 1962). 3

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The Egyptian national movement began to emerge in the late nineteenth century, and was antagonistic towards the foreign communities in the country, who enjoyed a privileged regime under a system of capitulations. Only subsequently did it oppose the British occupation. These years saw the struggle against the British, the revolution of 1919 and the rise of political leaders such as Mustafa Kamil and Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid. During those years, a new political question emerged as religious and identity claims were replaced by a decisive form of cooperation and collective participation in the name of national unity and a shared national narrative. Between the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century, political relations between Christians and Muslims were characterized by common participation in the struggle for the independence of Egypt, a British protectorate since 1882, based on a cohesive territorial and ethnic belonging. Nationalism, in fact, became the element of union around which the different religious confessions converged. L’union sacrée realized during the anti-British uprising of 1919 represented the peak of this movement. The ideological context changed during the 1930s as a result of the profound transformation of Egyptian society, the new urbanization and the economic crisis. As a consequence, collaboration between religious communities suffered the effects of this mutation and ‘the new urban well-educated population gave rise to a new elite more inclined to preserve traditional costumes. Instead of the Pharaonic and pro-Western nationalism it became a promoter of a new Arab and Islamic identity’. 4 The spread of movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, with its re-Islamizing social agenda, put into question the role of the Coptic community in Egyptian society. During the years of colonialism, some upperclass Copts had actively participated in Egyptian politics as members of political parties, but from the 1950s onwards there has been a shift away from any participation in ideological and political debate. Marta Petricioli, ‘Dal nazionalismo arabo al nazionalismo egiziano’, in Realtà e memoria di una disfatta. Il Medio Oriente dopo la guerra dei Sei Giorni, Eds. Alberto Tonini, Marcella Simoni, (Firenze, 2010), p. 8. 4

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In the aftermath of the coup, the new leadership, considering the composition of the multi-confessional country, was soon to deal with the issue of political-religious pluralism: could it still have been possible for non-Muslim religious communities to find a space of expression or for ‘survival’, as Anthony D. Smith remarked, 5 in a state with a Muslim majority? Albert Hourani 6 pointed out that secular nationalism, as adopted by Nasser, could represent a sufficient basis for the creation of a national community and a stable government in countries such as Egypt, where different ethnic and confessional communities are present. Scott W. Hibbard 7 wonders whether in the Arab world the concept of nation can be defined according to a secular orientation or whether it has to be based on explicit references to Islam. In the latter case, it would exclude also the possibility of including religious minorities present in Egypt, some of which, like the Coptic community, identified themselves with a secular nationalism free from religious references. Questioning the role and presence of the religious factors in the context of a nationalist ideology, Panayotis J. Vatikiotis 8 explores the dialectic between state and religion and highlights the terms of the debate which, between the 1970s and 1980s, focused on Muslim perceptions of minority religious communities and the space reserved for them in a society where public power and faith are in conflict. Two deeply different points of view emerged: on the one side ‘those who claim that the Muslim can be a believer, a member of the umma and the bearer of an Islamic culture, while organizing their temporal and social life, in compliance with the laws made by man’, but on the other side are ‘those who claim that

100.

5

Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, (Oxford, 1988), p.

Albert Hourani, Minorities in the Arab World, (London, 1947), p. 119. Scott W. Hibbard, Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India and the United States, (Baltimore, 2010), p. 9. 8 Panayotis J. Vatikiotis, Islam and the State, (London, 1991), p. 89. 6 7

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it is not possible to define in any way Muslims without placing the law of God as the main pillar of temporal life’. 9 Sharing this approach, Gabriel Ben-Dor 10 points out how the politicization of religion – Islam in Egypt’s case – puts into question the notion of space reserved for non-Muslim communities and ‘poses a new and powerful challenge to the legality and autonomy of a state’. The Nasserist regime belongs historically to a phase of decolonization in which the independent Arab countries tried to assert their autonomy, recovering and rebuilding a common base around language, culture and history. It was a strong territorial nationalism, free from religious references, opposed to foreign interference, and permitting fragmented societies to restore their unity. The national movement had provided the Christians of Egypt with a way of integration into the social fabric: the motto al-din lillah wal-watan lil-jami (the religion for God and the homeland for all) expresses the foundation for the process of secularization of the public sphere through ‘la communautarisation des identités religieuses, non plus concurrentes mais constitutives de l’unité national’. 11 The 1952 revolution of the Free Officers was a response to the Arab defeat in Palestine in 1948, the Cairo fire of January 1952 and subsequent peasant and urban uprisings. The Nasserist period unleashed high levels of coercion and political violence, ‘représente un temps fort de réactivation de l’accord – conflictuel – de la société égyptienne avec elle-même.’ 12 By articulating a new basis and in original terms the formula of this agreement, the new regime put in place a reconfiguration of social space: on the political level, the state became a guarantor of Ibid., 90. Gabriel Ben-Dor, ‘Minorities in the Middle East: theory and practice’, in Minorities and the State in the Arab World, Eds. Ofra Bengio, Gabriel Ben-Dor, (Boulder, 1999), p. 4. 11 Alain Roussillon, ‘Nasser. 25 ans. Les termes de l’impossible bilan’, Nasser – 25 ans, Peuples Méditerranéens 74–75, (1996), p. 5. 12 Ibid. 9

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national unity and defense of the interests of the homeland. It was therefore not possible to accept deviations from the set goals, while special interests could only be realized within the organizations of the adopted political system. The intention of the new regime was to extend through media propaganda its control of education and cultural activity, and build an ideology around which society would coalesce. This ideology had the ‘necessity of a base-territory (iqlim qaʿida) around which all unification efforts and processes are to circle’: 13 Egypt. Secularism, embodied by the previous generation of Egyptian nationalists, was therefore invoked by Nasser with the same purpose. The commonality of language and the history of the Egyptian people helped to substantiate the idea of the nation: Nasser used the word ‘nation/umma’ for Egypt, but not in the traditional sense of the community of Muslim believers. Starting from the idea of a nationalism deeply rooted in the Egyptian soil, Nasser put in place a policy in which the sectarian tensions were absorbed by the authority of an unchallenged, almost absolute power. Political leadership was articulated around two decisive vectors for change: control and modernization. The contrast between the Nasserist regime on the one hand and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Communists on the other was not due to differences in programmes or the particular social projects proposed by them. The contrast centered on the system of legitimacy; the Muslim Brotherhood would have proposed the identification of the public sphere with the religious one. 14 The decision by Nasser to involve al-Azhar in the political project, and to exclude the extremist part of Muslim Brotherhood, was part of the competition for control of the official religious referents. The political program proposed by the Muslim Brotherhood ran Nazih N. Ayubi, Over Stating the Arab State. Politics and society in the Middle East, (London, 1996), p. 144. See also Charles D. Smith, ‘The Egyptian Copts: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Definition of Identity for a Religious Minority’, in Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies, Ed. Maya Shatzmiller, (Québec, 2005), pp. 59–60. 14 Alain Roussillon, ‘Nasser. 25 ans. Les termes de l’impossible bilan’, pp. 6–7. 13

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counter, through the role it reserved to religious factors, to the idea of a modern society embodied by Nasserist ideology, which programmatically ‘had to relegate religion in a not political space, but in an individual sphere.’ 15 Egyptian nationalism, the glue of national unity, sought to resolve the difficult relationship between din and dawla by subjecting religion to the authority of political power. This could explain how the Coptic community found in Nasser’s Egypt new impetus and a momentary pacification of religious conflicts.

NATIONALIZE THE RELIGION: COPTS AND MUSLIMS AT THE SERVICE OF THE STATE

In the early Republican period under the leadership of Nasser, sectarian clashes gave way to a period of reconciliation animated by the claim for national unity, which led the Coptic community to once more play a decisive role in political discourse. The distinctive element in the policy implemented by Nasser and his regime was the marginalization of the religious factors as political references during the 1950s and 1960s, until defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. 16 Although in many public speeches Nasser used terminology in which religious references abounded, at other times, talking about the relationship between politics and religion, he clearly indicated his personal preference for the separation of these two spheres of human activity. 17 Despite a rhetorical exaltation of religion, the secularist approach assumed a significant role in Nasser’s policies. As a secular reformer, aware of the importance of modernization for Egypt, in the mid-1960s the president promoted some family planning projects, as well as a moderate policy to support contraception. This was fully supported by the shaykh of Cairo, but Talal Asad, ‘Religion, National-State, Secularism’, in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, Eds. Peter Van Der Veer, Hartmut Lehmann, (Princeton, 1999), pp. 179–180. 16 James P. Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab nationalism, and the United Arab Republic, (Colorado, 2002), p. 34. 17 Ibid., p. 35. 15

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opposed by local religious representatives, still attached to tradition. 18 Nasser promoted equality between men and women – explicitly ratified in the Charter for National Action in 1962 – and, in 1956, suffrage for women, who were also allowed to hold ministerial posts. Nasser’s ideology, therefore, significantly attenuated Islamic rigour, which enabled him to avoid sectarian clashes, or at least to reduce them. Nasserism gave priority to the political and economical spheres in order to renovate the country through modernization and integration of different groups, whose aims were socio-political rather than Islamic. 19 Nasser’s challenge for modernization had to deal with a legacy of traditions and values deeply rooted in Egyptian society: the loyalty of the establishment ulama to the class of landowners, as well as the popularity of the Brotherhood and Islam’s role as a charismatic and centralizing force. To confront the obstacles to the modernizing project, Nasser tried to mobilize popular religious sentiment for his own purposes: the imams of mosques were obliged to persuade the faithful during the Friday sermons of the compatibility of Islam with the socialist policies of the state. Unable to completely eradicate the influence of tradition supported by religious institutions, the Nasser regime focused its propaganda on the development of the country and the Gabriel R. Warburg, ‘Islam and Politics in Egypt: 1952–80’, Middle Eastern Studies, 18/2 (1982), p. 137. These initiatives did not have significant results, and the rate of population growth in the following years was more than 2.5% per annum. Better results were obtained, however, in education reform. The old structures were modified in favour of a new school system and considerable progress was made towards literacy and high school and university education: between 1952 and 1969 there were 240,000 new graduates. However, it is necessary to highlight the difference between the city and the country: in the latter case, the literacy rate was very low. See Massimo Campanini, Storia dell’Egitto contemporaneo. Dalla rinascita ottocentesca a Mubarak, (Roma, 2005), p. 177. 19 AA.VV., ‘Tensions in Middle East Society’, Centre for the Study of the Modern Arab World (CEMAM) Reports, 1 (1975), pp. 72–73, pp. 28–29. 18

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construction of an idea of a vaguely traditionalist Islam inspired by libertarian beliefs. Far from being hostile to religious feeling, Nasser assimilated it into a political project that would provide support to the regime and necessary legitimacy. As Farah says, ‘in the competition for hegemony, some Egyptian elites manipulate religious divisions and ideological conflicts over the form of the state – secular or religious – in order to ensure safe access to power’. 20 Religion, both from the Islamic point of view as from the Christian, became a national question. The nationalizing policy of Nasser, aimed at controlling and reducing internal conflicts, attempted to overcome the dichotomy between din and dawla, clearly distinguishing the religious and political sphere. In the middle of the twentieth century the debate about the relationship between religion and the state was characterised by conflicting positions. For instance, the volume written by Khalid Muhammad Khalid, and titled Min huna nabdaʾ (We start from here, 1950), asserted the point of view subsequently adopted by the Nasser government. This was based on the conviction that ‘in the modern era a religious government afforded no advantage to Muslims and that there was no alternative to the separation of religion and the state’. 21 It was also critical of the ideology of the Brotherhood. In fact, Khalid adds, in a reworking of the thesis of ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, ‘this façade of organic unity between religion and politics in Islam makes it difficult for Egypt, as it does for other Muslim countries, to carry out governmental modernization with any significant degree of secularization’. 22 Nadia R. Farah, Religious Strife in Egypt: Crisis and Ideological Conflict in the Seventies, (New York, 1986), p. 24. 21 Meir Hatina, ‘On the Margins of Consensus: The Call to Separate Religion and State in Modern Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies, 36/1 (2000), p. 46. 22 Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804–1952, (Cambridge, 1961), p. 233. 20

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On the other hand, shaykh Muhammad al-Ghazali, in his work entitled Min huna naʿlam (Our start in the wisdom, literally From here we learn), also published in 1950, states that ‘Islam offers a program capable of regulating all aspects of human existence, including, of course, the political and social one […] finding the duties of the state mentioned in the Qurʾan and the Sunnah’. 23 The refusal to consider religion as fertile ground on which build national identity and the state was manifested in the early years of the new revolutionary regime as a response to the challenge posed by the Muslim Brotherhood. Nationalism needed to be reinterpreted in light of socialism and secularism in order to become a tool of the government. A large number of writers 24 emphasized the egalitarian and revolutionary nature of the Muslim religion, the importance of solidarity and social responsibility, and it was common to find such references even in the speeches of Nasser, who invoked frequently the important issue of social justice. Nasserism became the ideology of unification and national unity, the antithesis of religious unity. From 1961, al-Azhar became the channel of regime propaganda: the union between Islam and socialism was announced in the fatwas of the new official shaykh. 25 Some scholars emphasize the instrumental nature of Nasser’s fascination with the religious sphere: [A]fter taking power, the military regime searched for new tools in order to achieve two goals related to Islam in Egypt:

Ibid., p. 235. His project found followers among many Egyptian intellectuals: Azharites and secularists. Former Egyptian Muslim brother ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Kamil, who was designated by the official organ of the party to write the so-called ‘religious pages’, emphasized, in particular, the concept of social justice in Islam. Nazih N. Ayubi, ‘The Political Revival of Islam: The Case of Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 12/4 (1980), p. 489, n. 29. 25 Tamir Moustafa, ‘Conflict and Cooperation between the State and Religious Institutions in Contemporary Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 32/1 (2000), p. 7. 23 24

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first, to mobilize the masses with the aim of obtaining support for the government’s policies and neutralize potential opposition to these achievements by the religious leaders; second, take advantage of the Islamic religion to conduct the foreign policy of the regime in the Arab world and in Africa. This policy was reinforced gradually as the regime realized that Islam remained the largest and most powerful base of support, despite all efforts to promote nationalism, patriotism, secularism and socialism. 26

This position, which considered religion to be a mere political tool, clashed with the defenders of religion, in particular the Brotherhood. ‘In reaction to the program promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood, the leaders of the new government opposed the disavowal of religion as a political referent […]. The axiom that ‘religion belongs to God, the watan to each individual living in it’appears to have been more than just a convenient slogan for Nasser and his associates in command of the Egyptian ship of state after 1952’. 27 On the one side, the President secured the consent of the traditionalist Muslim population through the introduction of measures favorable to Islam since 1955, 28 while on the other the government harshly repressed the Muslim Brotherhood, which was banned in 1954, and its supporters tortured and put to death. Other measures included the reform of al-Azhar in 1961, 29 which

Morroe Berger, Islam in Egypt Today. Social and Political Aspects of a Popular Religion, (Cambridge, 1970), pp. 46–47. 27 James P. Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab nationalism, and the United Arab Republic, p. 37. 28 Voile Brigitte, ‘Cyrille VI et Nasser: le face-à-face du saint et du héros, 1959–1970’, p. 172. These measures included the compulsory teaching of the Koran in private schools, the multiplication of mosques, the public reading of the Koran on television shows and the importance in social and political life of the ceremonies planned in the month of Ramadan. Added to this was the reform of al-Azhar in 1961, which transformed the ʿalim into public servants. 29 In June 1961, the regime applied the reform of al-Azhar through law n. 103 by changing the contents of the subjects transmitted in 26

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transformed, as a result of ‘a policy of domestication’, 30 the ulama in public servants, and the reform of religious courts in 1955. Law n. 462 31 abolished the Shariʿa and the Milli religious courts, which exercised jurisdiction over affairs of personal status in the Muslim and non-Muslim communities, respectively. Legal cases would come within the competence of the civil judiciary, which caused the ulama to lose all their administrative and judicial functions. The awqaf 32 were expropriated in 1968. Regarding the Coptic question, the public and private spheres closely intersected. The policy pursued towards the Coptic community responded to requests of the clergy, supporting the religious institutes and universities, as well as the administrative organization. The new subjects, such as natural sciences, mathematics and geography, were introduced into the curriculum alongside the traditional religious subjects in institutions that had replaced the ancient religious schools, the kuttab; the reform also created some new faculties (medicine, pharmacy and engineering) first in Cairo and later in the different provinces. The reform of 1961 directly affected the administration of alAzhar, which came under the control of the Egyptian state: the president directly appointed the shaykh of the institute. Malika Zeghal, ‘Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of al-Azhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952–94)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31/3 (1999), p. 376, and ‘Nasser et les oulemas d’al-Azhar. La ré-invention d’une mémoire politique’, Nasser – 25 ans, p. 103. 30 Gilles Kepel, Le prophète et pharaon. Les mouvements islamistes dans l’Égypte contemporaine, (Paris 1984), p. 205. 31 ‘al-Waqaʼiʻa al-Masriyya’, n. 73, 24 September 1955, p. 4. 32 The awqaf were the monastic endowments intended for ecclesiastical and charitable purposes. Awqaf had generally been divided into two types: endowments that arose from monasteries and those related to specific churches in the form of land and houses. The lay group inside the community had wished to gain control of the awqaf as they claimed that the income and properties were often managed for personal purposes by clergymen and monks, resulting in large profits and corruption. It suggested that the revenues should be administered by Maglis al-Milli, the community council, directly to the community in order to finance the maintenance of churches, schools, hospitals, public works, libraries and tombs.

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Patriarchy and, in particular, the willingness of the Patriarch Kyrollos VI, who assumed the role of official representative of the community. The partnership between the Patriarch and the President, in fact, denied Coptic lay people a role in both communal and national affairs. So, from 1952 onwards, Nasser ‘nationalized’ religion, controlling the university of al-Azhar and excluding the extremist Muslim Brotherhood in the competition for control of official religious references. By manipulating the religious sphere, reforming religious institutions and placing them at the service of the state, Nasser tried to insert religion into the nationalist discourse based on the official rhetoric of ‘national dialogue’ and ‘national unity’: al-Azhar University and other institutions became state institutions, while the Coptic Church became the national church of Egypt.

THE COPTIC CHURCH AS THE EGYPTIAN NATIONAL CHURCH: NASSER’S NATIONALISTIC PROJECT AND THE COPTS

In the aftermath of the revolution of 1952, the Free Officers, initially represented by General Muhammad Najib, 33 who became the first president of the Egyptian Republic, actively followed a policy that, in the delicate phase of stabilization in power, mobilized the Coptic community, as well as all members of society, in support of the new government. They called for national unity, The role played by some officers, destined to become the protagonists of the revolution, was initially very marginal: both Gamal ʻAbd al-Nasser and Anwar al-Sadat did not appear in the front line on the night of the coup. Muhammad Najib, the oldest member of the officers, but not a direct part of the group, was subsequently appointed to hold high political offices. The movement, in fact, needed an authoritative and popular face to present to the diplomatic delegations in the country and to the citizens: General Najib embodied all these expectations. In September 1952, Najib became Prime Minister, while Nasser was appointed Minister of the Interior. (See Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab nationalism, and the United Arab Republic, p. 21; Panayotis J. Vatikiotis, The History of Modern Egypt: from Muhammad Ali to Mubarak, (London, 1991, 4th Ed.), p. 384. 33

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equality and respect for the national ideal involving all Egyptians without distinction. The Copts, too, were invited to take an active part in the new revolutionary Egypt. This intention was underlined more than once by General Najib and the revolutionary establishment, especially in public speeches given between August 1952 and June 1953. 34 He stated, during a Friday prayer, that, ‘to keep one’s own religion does not mean fanaticism, but ours is a religion of tolerance, so we have to protect our brothers, the people of the Book, the celestial Book in general, and we have to protect the people of ‘dhimma’: the Qurʾan has commanded us to deal with them benevolently. They are citizens that we protect: these are the instructions of the Qurʾan’. 35 In particular, on the occasion of the celebration of nayruz (the Coptic New Year), organized at the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Cairo on 10 September 1952, General and Prime Minister Muhammad Najib stressed the importance ‘of the union and equality that ties into the new government all Egyptians’, 36 which he subsequently reaffirmed on 7 January 1953, for the celebration of the Coptic Christmas, 37 and on 23 June 1953, during his inauguration day as President of the Republic, when he said that ‘thanks to our policy the relationship between Muslims, Christians and Jews in Egypt have never been so friendly’. 38 Despite initial hesitation, the calls for national unity and an end to discrimination repeatedly launched by the new government See Alessia Melcangi, ‘Religious issues in Egypt: From Revolution to Nasser and Back’, in Winds of Democratic Change in the Mediterranean? Processes, Actors and Possible Outcomes, Eds. Stefania Panebianco, Rosa Rossi, (Soveria Mannelli, 2012). 35 N.a., al-Din li-l-lah wa-al-watan li-l-jamiʿ, «Misr», n. 15416, 13 August 1952, p. 1. 36 N.a., al-Liwaʾ Muhammad Najib, raʾis al-wuzaraʾ, yasil ila maktab wazir al-difaʿ, wa-yatawajjah ila muʾassasat al-Tawfiq min ajl al-ihtifal bi-raʾs al-sana alqibtiyya, «Misr», n. 15437, 10 September 1952, p. 1. 37 N.a., Le Général Mohamed Najib a assisté à la messe de minuit copteorthodoxe, «La Bourse Égyptienne», 7 janvier, 1952. 38 Muhammad Neguib, Egypt’s destiny: A Personal Statement, (London, 1955), p. 259. 34

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drew the support of many political groups and representatives of civil society. In the months following the coup, upper middle class intellectuals and young Copts decided to join the revolutionary group, keeping the struggle for recognition of the political and constitutional rights of the Christian community in the foreground. The message was clear: Najib was not only negotiating a place for Copts in post-revolutionary Egypt, but also actively lobbying reformist Coptic organizations with similar agendas. 39 Many important lay-led societies, such as al-Tawfiq, 40 al-Jamʿiyya alKhayriyya al-Qibtiyya (the Coptic Benevolent Society) 41 and many professional middle class men 42 answered the roll call. As underlined by the Coptic newspaper Misr in the months following the revolution: …the Copts are among the first who praise the great leader from the depth of their hearts, believing in him as the person who most of all defends the unity between the two elements of the nation, and as the person more aware of the precepts of Islam that force to collaborate with citizens, the ‘dhimma’ 43. Vivian Ibrahim, The Copts of Egypt. The challenges of modernization and identity, (London, 2011), p. 160. 40 The Jamʿiyya al-Tawfīq was a philanthropic group created by members of the laity in 1891 with the aim of promoting cultural and spiritual renewal within the Coptic community. For further details see Vivian Ibrahim, The Copts of Egypt. The Challenges of Modernization and Identity, pp. 104–105. 41 The Coptic Benevolent Society was the first Coptic charitable society established in 1881 with the aim of serving benevolent purposes for the welfare of the Coptic community in particular and Egyptians in general. For further details see Vivian Ibrahim, The Copts of Egypt. The challenges of Modernization and Identity, p. 114. 42 Ibid., p. 160. 43 Historically, the relationship between the Islamic state and nonMuslims was based on the concept of the dhimma, a protection contract, and was used to designate a sort of indefinitely renewed contract through which the Muslim community accorded hospitality and protection to Jews and Christians (known collectively as ahl al-dhimma, the People of the Book) on condition that they paid the jizya, a poll tax. Living as second39

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ALESSIA MELCANGI Therefore also the Copts do not listen to all those who try to scare them about the new era […]. The religion, however, does not mean fanaticism, but it has only one meaning: that there is, despite the diversity of their beliefs, spiritual unity between all citizens able to fight against who deny religions, who make fun of faith in God and who oppose religious belief. 44

Nasser’s rise to power followed the path laid out by General Najib in the earliest years of republican government. Although the Coptic community suffered from the expropriations of the 1960s and was excluded from playing a political role, it found in Nasserist Egypt a new impetus and a temporary pacification of religious conflicts thanks to a strong national sense of integration. As a consequence, the Coptic group shaped the features of its identity in relation to the state ideology, distancing itself from any kind of identification with the other Christian minorities present in the Middle East. This could be read as a definitive adhesion of the Coptic community to the nationalism expressed by the regime: Egypt and the belief in the nationalist cause for the Copts became distinctive characteristics of their identity. 45 The Suez War (1956) and the 1967 Arab-Israeli War represented for Egypt two important moments of rebirth and revival of the nationalist ideal. In fact, from 1956 onward, the identification of the aspirations of the Coptic hierarchy with those of the government became very explicit. The official support of the Patriarch and the bishops for the government’s foreign policy was

class citizens in a situation that guaranteed Muslim conquerors political and economic supremacy, they could keep their religion and much of their social organization, but were subject to numerous personal and political restrictions. See Georges Vajda, s.v. ‘Ahl al-Kitab’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, I, (Leiden, 1986, 2nd Ed.), pp. 264–266; Claude Cahen, s.v. ‘Dhimma’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, II, (Leiden, 1991, 2nd Ed.), pp. 227–231; Aziz S. Atiya, s.v. ‘Ahl al-Dhimmah’, The Coptic Encyclopedia, I, (New York 1991), pp. 72–73. 44 N.a., al-Din li-l-lah wa-al-watan li-l-jamiʿ, «Misr», n. 15416, 13 August 1952, p. 1. 45 Charles D. Smith, ‘The Egyptian Copts: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Definition of Identity for a Religious Minority’, pp. 59–60.

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regularly expressed, despite the internal problems that the Coptic community had to face. On those occasions, Copts expressed their loyalty to the president and the government. 1956 was the year when, as in the early twentieth century, the flag of the Crescent and the Cross appeared again in demonstrations, symbolizing the strength of the struggle against an enemy common to Muslims and Christians. During the days of the war, both Christian and Muslim leaders proclaimed the birth of ‘a Islamic-Christian union’ 46 in the face of the grave situation that followed the nationalization of the Suez Canal. Additionally, the Coptic newspaper Misr, mobilized in favour of the nationalist cause, from July to the end of December 1956 devoting daily space to numerous articles in support of President Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser. 47 On 4 October 1956, an important demonstration was held in the seat of the Coptic Patriarchate where the following official statement was made public: The Egyptian people stand firmly behind President Gamal Abdel Nasser in his policy of nationalizing the Suez Canal, which is an integral part of the Egyptian territory. The Conference deplores the policy of certain governments and their attempts to infringe Egypt’s sovereignty and her legitimate right to realize her independence. Members, young

The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), Foreign Office (FO) 371/119154, “Coptic Conference of Suez”, British Embassy, Cairo, October 5, 1956. 47 N.a., Al-maglis al-batriyarki yuhanniʼu al-raʾis bi-mawqif al-butula al-raʾiʿ fi taʾmim qanat al-Suways, «Misr», n. 16602, 27 July 1956, pp. 1–2; Talʿat Yūnān, Talʿat Yunan, Misr al-muʿtadila wa-l-hurra tadʿam al-salam maʿa taʿmim qanat al-Suis, «Misr», n. 16605, 31 July 1956, pp. 2–3; N.a., Muʾtamar watani bi-qaʿat gamʿiyyat al-Malak bi-Subra. 10 alaf muslim wa-qibti yatatawwaʿuna fi gays al-tahrīr. Kalimat li-l-Baquri wa-l-Tahawi wa-l-qummus Arsaniyus waYuwaqim Gabriyal, «Misr», n. 16626, 24 August 1956, pp. 2–4. 46

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The meeting was opened by the speech of Iskandar Damian, vicechairman of the Maglis al-Milli, 49 followed by that of the shaykh alBaquri, Minister of Awqaf. Closing the debate al-Baquri declared: ‘[…] We are members of the same family. […] The Egyptian nation should be a single body where everyone knows his duties and rights. […] Everyone must profess deeply their own religion, but with faith and sincerity, in the same way that black and red are united by the symbolic white colour of the flag of the revolution’. 50 However, the political participation of Copts cannot be read just looking at the nationalistic belonging. Actually, the changes of the 1950s highlight the presence of a significant reordering within the community that implied a revision of the language of action. 51 As Dina Al-Khawaga states, 52 it is necessary to consider the varied composition of the Coptic community. According to Al-Khawaga, the Christian community in Egypt has distinguished itself over time from all others in the Middle East for ‘having almost never crystallized a typical sectarian political action’ 53 but, rather, to have strengthened the national dimension PRO, FO 371/119154, “Coptic Conference of Suez” 1956, British Embassy, Cairo, October 5, 1956. 49 The Maglis al-Milli represented the institution through which the lay group within the community could express its opinions in order to counterbalance the power of the clergy. It was created in 1874 as a community council to deal with matters concerning personal status, as well as the administration of awqaf lands. 50 Ambasciata d’Italia presso la Santa Sede (AISS), b. 293 RAU 1955–59, pos. A25/1 Egitto 1950–56, “Abolizione delle giurisdizioni di Statuto personale dei non musulmani e dei Tribunali Sciaraitici”, ambasciata italiana al Cairo, 8 novembre 1956, p. 2. 51 Dina Al-Khawaga, ‘Le débat sur les coptes: le dit et le non-dit’, Égypte/Monde Arabe, 1/20 (1994), pp. 67–69. 52 Ibid. 53 Dina Al-Khawaga, ‘Le dinamiche politiche dei copti: rendere la comunità un protagonista attivo’, in Comunità cristiane nell’islam arabo. La sfida del futuro, Ed. Andrea Pacini, (Torino, 1996), p. 187. 48

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of the community and church since the modern age. In fact, the persistence of the reference to national unity emerged in public relations between the Coptic community and leadership in power, although the church and the community have responded differently to the political challenges. The al-Tawfīq association, made up of students and young professional, educated laymen, and the Coptic Benevolent Society, first supported the revolutionaries’ policy. Political demands were raised by a small party, al-Hizb alDimuqrati al-Misīhi (The Christian Democratic Party), formed in the late 1940s by the Coptic lawyer Ramsis Gabrawi. It supported the revolution and used nationalistic rhetoric to obtain the recognition of Coptic rights. The most notable example of a Coptic youth movement was that of Jamaʿat al-Umma al-Qibtiyya, the Coptic Nation Society, established by the young lawyer Ibrahim Fahmi Hilal with the aim of reviving and reforming the Coptic Church and lobbying for Coptic political participation in post-revolutionary Egypt. 54 During the 1950s, another movement, born among younger clergy, asked for change, accusing the clerical establishment of being unable to support the aspirations of the community. The Coptic Renewal (Nahda Kanassiyya) began revitalizing the spiritual sphere and replaced the secular elite, becoming the voice of the community. The new model of action aimed at a ‘renewal from below’. 55 From 1959, the date of the election of the new Patriarch Kyrillos VI, the candidate supported by them, younger clergy started to closely collaborate with the policies of Nasser. The movement did not use explicitly religious language, but rather responded to the national unity appeal, launched by the leadership, through a new kind of communitarian mobilization that ceased the quest for independence, dialogued with the powerful through an alternative space: the ecclesial one understood in this It acquired a big following among Coptic youth, and organized the kidnapping of Patriarch Yusab II, on July 25 1954, as an act of protest against the Church hierarchy, which was accused of corruption. 55 Al-Khawaga, ‘Le dinamiche politiche dei copti: rendere la comunità un protagonista attivo’, p. 206. 54

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case as a priority space for action. 56 From the 1960s onward, young priests began to support socialist projects and used the antiimperialist and anti-Zionist speeches of the regime. On the one hand, they began to emphasize their dual adherence to Christianity and Nasser’s thought. On the other, Nasser’s policy weakened the Coptic elite, which had taken an active part in politics during the monarchy. Their political participation was reduced while that of the clergy increased. 57 This prospect seemed coherent with the Nasserist project that, by isolating the Muslim Brotherhood and putting al-Azhar under the control of the state, sought to legitimize itself from a religious point of view. While during the 1950s many Copts had chosen to leave Egypt, those who remained never doubted their identity and sense of belonging to the Egyptian nation, and although the religious sphere polarized private feelings of citizens, loyalty to the Egyptian soil exalted the public one. By supporting the nationalist and socialist project but especially opposing the fitna taʾifiyya (sectarian clashes) and considering Copts and Muslims as part of a single nation, the Coptic Church prepared the reconciliation with the government. 58 During the last years of Nasser’s government, complete support of the Coptic community seems to have been secured for the Egyptian nationalist ideal promoted by the regime. The symbol of this full concordance was the good relationship that developed between the raʾis and Kyrillos VI, elected Coptic Patriarch on 19 April 1959 59 or, as Brigitte Voile 60 has said, ‘between the hero and From the creation of cultural and pastoral networks to the emergence of new structures of socialization (religious teaching and publishing houses), the activity of the Coptic Renewal was able to mobilize the faithful urbanized, providing them with a community space. 57 In 1962, Nasser decided to abolish the Majlis al-Milli in order to leave total power in the hands of the Patriarch. 58 Sebastian Elsässer, The Coptic Question in the Mubarak Era, (New York, 2014), p. 115. 59 The Patriarch of Alexandria is the Archbishop of Alexandria and Cairo. According to church tradition, the Patriarchate was founded in 42 A.D. by the Apostle Saint Mark the Evangelist. All churches acknowledge 56

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the qiddʾis, or saint, as the contemporaries like to call them’. This was not only a personal friendship, but also a political relationship based on political and economic interests. Moreover, this mutual understanding assumed importance thanks to its media impact on public opinion. The local press, hagiographic publications and historical sources reported the details of this ‘strange’ friendship. But what impressed those who participated in public events is the recurring image of the raʾis and the Patriarch holding hands and hugging each other affectionately, as testified by the official photos, such as that taken at the opening of St. Mark’s Cathedral in 1968. This helped to create an image of a united Egypt in the battle against external imperial forces, but resolutely solidified in its Egyptian, pan-Arab and pan-African agenda 61 and changed the Alexandrian Patriarchate, hitherto the centre of a transnational church, into the national Egyptian Church. Until 1959, the Ethiopian church had also been under the jurisdiction of the Coptic Church of Egypt. The Patriarch declared officially that the Coptic Church would no longer participate with other Christian churches in the annual presentation of greetings to the head of state, affirming his faith in a common national ideal. 62 With this act, Kyrollos also tried to distinguish the Coptic Church from the Greek Orthodox and the Greek-Catholic Churches, which had seen most of their faithful leave Nasser’s Egypt. the same succession of church leaders up to about the Council of Chalcedon (451 A.D.), which gave rise to the non-Chalcedonian Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, and to the Chalcedonian Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria. 60 Brigitte Voile, ‘Cyrille VI et Nasser: le face-à-face du saint et du héros, 1959–1970’, p. 168. 61 Magdi Guirguis, Nelly van Doorn-Harder, The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy. The Egyptian Church and its Leadership from the Ottoman Period to the Present, vol. 3, (Cairo, 2011), p. 136. 62 Brigitte Voile, Les Coptes d’Égypte sous Nasser: sainteté, miracles, apparitions, (Paris, 2004), p. 202.

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The official support of the patriarch and bishops to the government’s foreign policy helped to create the image of an Egypt united against external enemies. It was strengthened through the participation of Gamal ʻAbd al-Nasser and Kyrollos VI in memorable events, such as the construction of the Cathedral of St. Mark in 1965 and the apparitions of the Virgin Mary in 1968 in the Zeitun district of Cairo. 63 The Coptic Church also showed solidarity in times of crisis for the Nasser regime, such as after the defeat of 1967 at the hands of Israel, when the Copts shared the pain and distress of the Muslim community. This helped to restore the image of a country brought to its knees but internally united. On 24 July 1965, Nasser and Kyrillos VI started the project of building the biggest African cathedral, the Cathedral of St. Mark, in the centre of Cairo. The raʾis participated not only personally, but also economically by financing and placing nationalized industries at the Patriarchate’s disposal. On the occasion of the inauguration of St. Mark’s Cathedral, the president emphasized in a speech, ‘the only identitary belonging is the Egyptian one and Islam recognizes Christians as brothers in religion and brothers in God. We can no longer tolerate the attitude of fanatics who create problems and obstacles to the revolutionary road of the people’. 64 He continued, ‘for love, for fraternity, equality and equal opportunities, we are able to create a powerful homeland that doesn’t know sectarianism, but only patriotism’. 65 Patriarch Kyrollos VI replied, ensuring full On 2 April 1968, ten months after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, in a district some fifteen miles north of Cairo, the Virgin is reported to have appeared on the dome of a Coptic Christian church in the district of Zeitun. Immediately after the phenomenon of 2 April, a committee was designated by Kyrillos VI to undertake investigations and determine whether or not the Virgin had appeared at Zeitun Church. Following this day, the Church of Zeitun became a centre of religious fervor, drawing thousands of people from every corner of the country and many from neighbouring countries. 64 Otto F.A. Meinardus, Christian Egypt, Faith and Life, (Cairo, 1970), p. 49. 65 AISS, b. 373, RAE (già RAU) 1959–1978, pos. 1 e 2, Rapporti RAE Santa Sede, ‘Discours du President Gamal Abdel Nasser a l’occasion 63

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loyalty to the government. The church’s official support manifested through anti-Israeli propaganda and in condemnation of imperialism and colonialism. As diplomatic sources show, with this speech Nasser wanted to ‘emphasize that the Coptic minority is always the object of his attention, while the Orthodox Patriarch has desired to affirm that the disputes with the Egyptian regime are closed and that his faithful, civil and religious, are now on the side of their Muslim compatriots in the ‘revolutionary road’’. 66 During the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the Patriarch’s alignment with the government’s position became absolute. A militant Coptic community rallied to the Patriarch. Public speeches of Kyrillos VI show how he called for a sacred struggle against Zionist imperialism, and the defense of socialism and Egypt. This behaviour is described in the numerous articles published in the newspapers The Egyptian Gazette and Madaris al-Ahad between July and September 1967, in which one finds numerous condemnations of Israeli policy by the Patriarch and the church, as well as calls for the defence of the rights of the Arabs in Jerusalem. 67 At that period, Patriarch Kyrillos VI forbade members of his church to make their usual pilgrimage to Jerusalem’s holy sites while the city was occupied by Israel. In addition, he ordered the most important bishops of the Coptic Church to explain the Arab position on the Middle East conflict during their travels in the USA and Europe, acting as ambassadors of Nasser. After the war and the occupation of the Arab sector of Jerusalem, Kyrollos VI turned all his efforts to the support of the Arab cause. He released numerous interviews to local and foreign press in which he argued for the defence of the rights of the Arabs de la pose de la premiere pierre de la nouvelle cathedrale CopteOrthodoxe, Le Samedi, 24 Juillet 1965’ (sic), tel. n. 02893, 31 luglio 1965, p. 2. 66 AISS, b. 373, RAE (già RAU) 1959–1978, pos. 1 e 2, Rapporti RAE Santa Sede, “Situazione delle Comunità cristiane in Egitto. Nuova Cattedrale copta del Cairo”, tel. n. 13/646/c, 3 agosto 1965, p. 2. 67 N.a., Al-ʿarab wa-l-Quds, «Madaris al-Ahad», n. 8°/9°, XXI, 1967, pp. 31–37.

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in Jerusalem and urged the implementation of decisions taken by the UN Security Council and rejection of the proposed internationalization of the city. In an article entitled ‘The role of the church in the battle’, published in the September 1967 issue of the church newspaper Madaris al-Ahad, it states: The voice of Pope Kyrollos VI addressed to all the peoples of the earth once with letters and speeches and once with the telegraph and radio to explain the Arab point of view and to work on removing the traces of the attack. In addition to prayers and fasting, His Holiness, the Pope launched along with His Excellency Al-Azhar Imam a joint statement. 68

In the text of the joint statement Kyrollos VI and the shaykh of alAzhar, Hassan Maamun, together criticised ‘international Zionism’ 69 and aggression thusly: This is the new era and there is a light that will not disappear anymore, since the word of Arabs has become one; […] Therefore, considering that we are in a climate of fraternity and serenity born in hearts full of faith in God, full of sincere love and loyalty to our nation and our homeland, let’s speak, under these hard conditions where peace is threatened, to the whole world, address to the feelings and the consciences of the people of the world with a unique word and a common decision. 70

CONCLUSION

The naqsa of 1967 marked the beginning of a profound change for all Egyptians not only at the political level, but also ideologically: Nasserist secularism, which had previously assigned to religion a relative space, was restored by the rediscovery of faith and the fundamental role that it should play in Egyptian society. N.a., Dawr al-kanisa fi-l-maʿaraka, «Madaris al-Ahad», n. 7°, XXI, 1967, pp. 1–13. 69 Ibid., p. 4. 70 Ibid. 68

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For the Muslim community but also for the Christian one, the defeat by Israel would be stigmatized as a sin, to symbolize the estrangement of government policy from the traditional religious ideals. On that occasion, the ulama instrumentalized the theme of disaster in order to appeal to the people’s consciences and push them to take refuge in religion. The separation between the religious sphere and the political one, initiated by the colonial power and continued by modern authoritarian regimes, provoked the reaction of the Islamic movements which led to the rise of radicalism in the 1970s. On occurrence of Kyrillos’ death in 1971, Bishop Shenouda was elected Pope of the See of St. Mark, one year before Anwar alSadat (1970–1981), after the unexpected death of Nasser, became the new President of the Egyptian Republic. These events opened the door on a new era for the relationship between the state and the Copts. Sadat gave impetus to an Islamization process that pushed Islam again to the fore as the common denominator of the majority, thus leaving the Copts out of the political arena. 71 The shift to Islamic themes as the main constituent of the Egyptian community and the rise of sectarian tensions led Copts to be relegated to a secondary status as outsiders. They have certain rights as a ‘protected’ and accepted ancient minority, but are not, and never can be, part of the Islamic core identity and they must therefore be politically marginalized. They progressively retreated on the communal level with the development of a Coptic Church that incorporated not only the religious practices but also most of the social and cultural activities of the Copts. In this period, the Coptic Church emerged as the community’s effective political representative and eclipsed the secular Coptic elite as a consequence of the election of Bishop Shenouda as Patriarch in October 1971. He was not only the spiritual guide of the community but also its political leader able to challenge the state during 1970s thanks to the mobilization of the Coptic community at his side. Shenouda restored the authority of Hamied Ansari, ‘Sectarian Conflict in Egypt and the Political Expediency of Religion’, Middle East Journal, 38/3 (1984), pp. 400–401. 71

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the church hierarchy and re-centred the communal life on the church. The political leadership of Pope Shenouda, in fact, coincided with a growing sense of Coptic nationalism or ethnic consciousness. Sadat’s appeal to Islamic heritage alienated the traditionally quiescent Coptic community 72 and provoked several conflicts between al-Raʾis al-Muʾmin 73 (the devout president) and the Pope, as well as violent social clashes between the religious groups. The claim to religion as a distinctive element of the new nationalist ideology led to an ideological fragmentation in the national apparatus, injecting hatred and repulsion from both sides and leading to the first violent sectarian clashes in the history of contemporary Egypt. 74 The increasing polarization of society showed how necessary it was to restore a common sense of belonging to Egypt, transcending religious loyalties. First the government coined the phrase that would become the slogan of the post-1952 regime: national unity, or the existence of Egypt as a nation based on the harmonious co-existence of Copts and Muslims, which must be defended from the fitna taʾifiyya. But it was not enough to prevent conflicts and, moreover, to weaken the power of the jamaʿat

David Zeidan, ‘The Copts. Equal, Protected or Persecuted? The Impact of Islamization on Muslim-Christian Relations in Modern Egypt’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 10/1, (1999), p. 57. 73 Muhammad H. Haykal, Autumn of Fury: the Assassination of Sadat, (London, 1983), 129; Sana S. Hasan, Christian versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-long Struggle for Coptic Equality, (Oxford, 2003), p. 105. 74 One of the most serious among them was that which happened in the village of Khanka, in the governorate of Qalyubia, in 1972, where a church was set on fire. See Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes (CADN): Ambassade de France au Caire 1963–1990, no. 41 Questions religieuses, fasc. Rapports Musulmans et Chrétiens 1972–1981, “D’un incident interconfessionnel”, Le Caire, le 17 novembre 1972, pp. 1–4; ivi, “Crise entre Coptes et Musulmans”, Le Caire, le 13 novembre 1972, pp. 1–2. 72

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islamiyya 75 supported by many Muslims. As Gilles Kepel states, ‘they consider them according to the status as dhimmi, which represents the one and the only admissible method to accept their existence […]. It becomes a duty of good Muslims to oppose their destructive actions’. Under the presidency of Hosni Mubarak (1981–2011), an attempt was made to establish a balance in the relationship between the leadership and the Christians, avoiding sectarian clashes. This was based on shared Egyptian identity and the social intermingling of Copts and Muslims in a single social context, ‘two elements in the Egyptian national fabric’. 76 Official rhetoric of ‘national dialogue’ and ‘national unity’, 77 while apparently trying to break down barriers, did not consider the real problems that face

These ‘Islamic groups’ started as a very popular student organization in a modern Egyptian university. The group that afterwards took the name of the jamaʿat islamiyya was focusing at the time on installing moral and social ethics in the university based on a series of rules that they considered ‘Islamic’. It was only later that the groups started to advocate direct and violent confrontation against the regime, expanding its political activities outside the university and projected the plan to kill Sadat with the collaboration of the Jihad group. For further details see Gilles Kepel, Le prophète et pharaon. Les mouvements islamistes dans l’Égypte contemporaine; Joel Beinin and Joe Stork (eds.), Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, (Berkeley CA, 1997), which examine Islamic attacks on Copts and the attitudes behind them; Hamied N. Ansari, ‘The Islamic Militants in Egyptian Politics’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 16/1, (1984), pp. 123–144. 76 Elizabeth Iskander, ‘The ‘Mediation’ of Muslim–Christian Relations in Egypt: The Strategies and Discourses of the Official Egyptian Press During Mubarak’s Presidency’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 23/1 (2012), p. 32; Karim Al-Gawhary, ‘Copts in the “Egyptian Fabric”’, Middle East Report, 200 (1996), p. 22. 77 Ibid, p. 34. 75

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Christians today. 78 The call to national unity became more a means to avoid a nuanced discussion of the challenges inherent in the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims. Religion aggressively entered the political arena and proved unable to contain the clashes between religious groups. This development marked the sunset of the Nasserist experiment and intercommunal collaboration, and led to a retreat into community identities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY A. Primary sources Archival Material

The National Archives: Public Record Office, Kew

– Foreign Office (FO). Series 371, Political Departments: General Correspondence, 1906–1966. Centre des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes.

– Ambassade de France au Caire 1963–1990. Carton n. 41, Questions religieuses, fasc. Rapports Musulmans et Chrétiens (1972–1981). Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri

– Ambasciata d’Italia presso la Santa Sede. Busta n. 293, RAU 1955–59, pos. A25/1 Egitto 1950–56;

n. 373, RAE (già RAU) 1959–1978, pos. 1 e 2, Rapporti RAE Santa Sede. Newspapers – Dār al–kutub al–wathā’iq al-qawmī (Egyptian National Books and Archives), Cairo - In Arabic and French «La Bourse Égyptienne», 1952.

N.a., ‘Ending Sectarianism in Egypt’, The Free Copts [on-line], 15 January 2011. Available at: http://english.freecopts.net/english//index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1199&Itemid=9, [12.05.2014] 78

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«MadAris al-Ahad» (Cairo), 1967. «Misr», 1952–1956

«al-WaqAʼiʻa al-Masriyya» (Cairo), 1955. B. Secondary sources Books and Articles AA.VV., Tensions in Middle East Society in “Centre for the Study of the Modern Arab World (CEMAM) Reports”, 1, 72–73 (1975). Hamied N. Ansari, ‘The Islamic Militants in Egyptian Politics’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 16/1, (1984). ———, ‘Sectarian Conflict in Egypt and the Political Expediency of Religion’, Middle East Journal, 38/3 (1984). Talal Asad, ‘Religion, National-State, Secularism’, in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, Eds. Peter Van Der Veer, Hartmut Lehmann, (Princeton, 1999). Aziz S. Atiya, s.v. ‘Ahl al-Dhimmah’, in The Coptic Encyclopedia, I, (New York 1991). Nazih N. Ayubi, ‘The Political Revival of Islam: The Case of Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 12/4 (1980). ———, Over Stating the Arab State. Politics and Society in the Middle East, (London, 1996). Joel Beinin, Joe Stork (eds.), Political Islam: Essays from Middle East Report, (Berkeley CA, 1997). Gabriel Ben-Dor, ‘Minorities in the Middle East: Theory and Practice’, in Minorities and the State in the Arab World, Eds. Ofra Bengio, Gabriel Ben-Dor, (Boulder, 1999). Morroe Berger, Islam in Egypt Today. Social and Political Aspects of a Popular Religion, (Cambridge 1970). Claude Cahen, s.v. ‘Dhimma’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, II, (Leiden, 1991). Massimo Campanini, Storia dell’Egitto contemporaneo. Dalla rinascita ottocentesca a Mubarak, (Roma, 2005). Sebastian Elsässer, The Coptic Question in the Mubarak Era, (New York, 2014).

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Nadia R. Farah, Religious Strife in Egypt: Crisis and Ideological Conflict in the Seventies, (New York, 1986). Karim Al-Gawhary, ‘Copts in the “Egyptian Fabric”’, Middle East Report, 200 (1996). Israel Gershoni, James P. Jankowski, Egypt, Islam, and the Arabs: the Search for Egyptian Nationhood, 1900–1930, (New York, 1986). Magdi Guirguis, Nelly Van Doorn-Harder, The Emergence of the Modern Coptic Papacy. The Egyptian Church and its Leadership from the Ottoman Period to the Present, 3 vol., (Cairo, 2011). Sana S. Hasan, Christian versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Centurylong Struggle for Coptic Equality, (Oxford, 2003). Meir Hatina, ‘On the Margins of Consensus: The Call to Separate Religion and State in Modern Egypt’, Middle Eastern Studies, 36/1 (2000). Muhammad H. Haykal, Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat, (London, 1983). Scott W. Hibbard, Religious Politics and Secular States: Egypt, India and the United States, (Baltimore, 2010). Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, (Cambridge, 1962). ———, Minorities in the Arab World, (London, 1947).
 Vivian Ibrahim, The Copts of Egypt. The Challenges of Modernization and Identity, (London, 2011). Elizabeth Iskander, ‘The ‘Mediation’ of Muslim–Christian Relations in Egypt: The Strategies and Discourses of the Official Egyptian Press During Mubarak’s Presidency’, in Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 23/1 (2012). James P. Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab nationalism, and the United Arab Republic, (Colorado, 2002). Gilles Kepel, Le prophète et pharaon. Les mouvements islamistes dans l’Égypte contemporaine, (Paris, 1984). Dina Al-Khawaga, ‘Le débat sur les coptes: le dit et le non-dit’, Égypte/Monde Arabe, 1/20 (1994). ———, ‘Le dinamiche politiche dei copti: rendere la comunità un protagonista attivo”, in Comunità cristiane nell’islam arabo. La sfida del futuro, Ed. Andrea Pacini, (Torino, 1996).

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———, ‘Nasser et les oulemas d’al-Azhar. La ré-invention d’une mémoire politique’, in Nasser – 25 ans, Peuples Mediterranéens 74–75, (1996). Otto F.A. Meinardus, Christian Egypt, Faith and Life, (Cairo, 1970). Alessia Melcangi, ‘Religious Issues in Egypt: From Revolution to Nasser and Back’, in Winds of Democratic Change in the Mediterranean? Processes, Actors and Possible Outcomes, Eds. Stefania Panebianco, Rosa Rossi, (Soveria Mannelli, 2012). Muhammad Neguib, Egypt’s Destiny, (London, 1955).
 Anthony O’Mahony, Loosley Emma (eds.), Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East, (London, 2010). Marta Petricioli, ‘Dal nazionalismo arabo al nazionalismo egiziano’, in Realtà e memoria di una disfatta. Il Medio Oriente dopo la guerra dei Sei Giorni, Eds. Tonini Alberto, Simoni Marcella, (Firenze, 2010). Alain Roussillon, ‘Nasser. 25 ans. Les termes de l’impossible bilan’, in Nasser – 25 ans, Peuples Mediterranéens, 74–75 (1996). Nadav Safran, Egypt in Search of Political Community: An Analysis of the Intellectual and Political Evolution of Egypt, 1804–1952, (Cambridge, 1961). Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, (Oxford, 1988). Charles D. Smith, ‘The Egyptian Copts: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Definition of Identity for a Religious Minority’, in Nationalism and Minority Identities in Islamic Societies, Ed. Shatzmiller Maya, (Québec, 2005). Moustafa Tamir, ‘Conflict and Cooperation Between the State and Religious Institutions in Contemporary Egypt’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 32/1 (2000). Georges Vajda, s.v. ‘Ahl al-Kitab’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, I, (Leiden, 1986). Panayotis J. Vatikiotis, Islam and the State, (London, 1991). ———, The History of Modern Egypt: From Muhammad Ali to Mubarak, (London, 1991). Brigitte Voile, ‘Cyrille VI et Nasser: le face-à-face du saint et du héros, 1959–1970’, in Saints et héros du Moyen-Orient contemporain, Ed. Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen, (Paris, 2002).

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———, Les Coptes d’Égypte sous Nasser: sainteté, miracles, apparitions, (Paris, 2004). Gabriel R. Warburg, ‘Islam and Politics in Egypt: 1952–80’, Middle Eastern Studies, 18/2 (1982). Malika Zeghal, ‘Religion and Politics in Egypt: The Ulema of alAzhar, Radical Islam, and the State (1952–94)’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 31/3 (1999). David Zeidan, ‘The Copts. Equal, Protected or Persecuted? The Impact of Islamization on Muslim-Christian Relations in Modern Egypt’, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 10/1 (1999).

7. THE LONER DESPERADO: OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN OCCUPIED PALESTINE ILAN PAPPE 1 National liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression, decolonization is always a violent event. (Franz Fanton, The Wretched of the Earth)

The research on the interaction between religion and nationalism in this and the previous century has focused on processes, movements and ideologies. Whatever one’s conclusion was on the balance between the two and the possible mutual impacts, the research tended to look for general macro explanations or analyses even when particular case studies were examined. The deficiencies of this approach were exposed when individual violent acts were taken in the name of Islam, but more often than not without any clear political framework or association of the perpetrator. The inapplicability of these analyses became even clearer when ‘political Islam’ or even ‘Jihadi Islam’ were reifications that only barely managed to define very fluid Islamic formations since the 1990s. Attributions to entities such as al-Qaida and lately ISIS were convenient points of reference for a violent act in the name of Islam in general and in the name of those formations in particular – Prof. Ilan Pappe is the Director of the European Centre for Palestinian Studies at the University of Exeter. 1

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whether there was or was not an affiliation of the individual to them. This very tenuous connection between the lone actor and recognised groups on the West’s terror list allowed of course for a wide range of excessive and disproportionate retaliation that in several cases included the occupation of foreign states with catastrophic results. While Western scholarship and political elites have been careful since 9/11 to distinguish between ‘fanatic Islam’ and ‘Islam’, the public perception through popular media was that ‘Islam’ was behind individual violent attacks. Thus, for instance, mainstream analysis concluded that the 2015 attacks on a Jewish Museum in Brussels, the beheading of a British soldier in London, a shooting spree in the Canadian parliament and the killing of cartoonists in Paris and Copenhagen were all acts perpetrated by ‘Islamists’. A geographical map connecting these individuals to the Middle East is immediately drawn and communication (often webbased) with elusive formations, such as al-Qaida or Islamic State, are detected. The wish to pre-empt such attacks in the future thus focuses on these affiliations and Internet connections and communications. Analytically and conceptually, these acts become additional anecdotes in the overall examination of the impact of fundamentalist or ‘fanatic’ Islamic dogmas on the West. It seems this analytical framework is convenient to all concerned and yet, in the context of this book, it highlights a crucial lacuna in the study of the interrelations between additional factors that can explain the violence and Islam. Such additional factors can be the predicament of immigration, social marginalization, economic deprivation and political oppression. It is not easy to determine the balance between the individual’s life experience and ‘Islam’ when it comes to assessing what are the major factors that triggered the will to act violently. Moreover, the existential reality that produced the impulse for action (or maybe personal mental constitution) can be as crucial as the exposure to religious dogmas in motivating the act itself. Based on the case study discussed here, it seems that social, economic and national deprivation is the impulse for acts described by the media and academics alike as ‘Islamic’, much more so than the exposure to political Islamic ideologies. As in other cases mentioned above, the discourse of the lone actor was indeed ‘Islamic’ but one could not immediately infer from this that the

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 197 motivation was religious or in response to a particular ideological take on Islam subscribed to by political Islamic groups in the area. The deprivation seemed to be the impulse and the religious dogma becomes the justification. Such an analysis has an impact on any attempt to engage with this violence in the future. The case study here is the fifty Palestinians involved in individual acts of violence against Israelis during the first Intifada, 1987–1991. They were branded by local media as the ‘stabbers’ as they used kitchen knives to attack their victims. A new wave of similar attack resurfaced recently in Israel during 2014 in the wake of the assault on Gaza and the dire realities in Greater Jerusalem. The frequent attacks by Palestinian workers inside Israel during 1989 produced one of the worst Islamophobic waves in the Jewish state, as the frequent stabbings were attributed solely by the political elite, the media and the academia to ‘Islam’. The religion in a very reductionist way was depicted as inevitably leading to violence against Israel and Jews wherever they were. This article offers to highlight the predominance of socioeconomic backgrounds, experience and hardships in cases that are self, and externally, described as Islamic violence. It seeks to humanise the perpetrators of the violence through their biography so as to offset analysis that focuses on the power of ‘incitement’, be it sermons, holy texts or the Internet. The basic assumption is that the faithful are easily induced to violence when they are called upon to do so in the name of Jihad (assuming that most Muslims accept Jihad as a religious imperative, although it is not, in Sunni Islam at least, one of the five pillars of Islam). The ‘stabbers’, according to the Israeli press from that period, did not have a nationalist or criminal past. It should be noted that these were the years of the first Intifada, the Palestinian uprising. In that uprising, although by and large the protest was non-violent, there were formations such as ‘The Red Eagles’, the ‘Fatah Vultures’ and the ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades’, whose members were organising here and there acts of armed struggle against Israeli occupation. The ‘stabbers’ were not part of these formations, although they shared the same socio-economic background of most of the members of these organizations. The stabbing was random and incidental. It left the Israeli security apparatus at a loss for a proper reaction (eventually it retaliated with the building in 2003 of a segregation wall when the

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stabbings were replaced by more focused acts of desperation in the form of suicide bombings, which began in the mid-1990s). The stabbings and similar desperate acts since 2009, when Israeli assaults on Gaza commenced and tough Israeli policies were enacted in the West Bank, proved that the wall, and similar obstacles, had little impact on the lone actor. At the time of the first wave of such attacks, circa 1989, the Israeli military reacted almost in a knee jerk way when it imposed closures on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip whenever a stabbing occurred. When these periods of closures lasted for a long time, the anger and the frustration, erupting in the form of stabbings, was directed against soldiers and Jewish settlers inside the occupied territories. This research focuses on fifty cases (one should say that very infrequent assaults took place also before 1989) of stabbing, most of them occurred within one year (1989) and left more than a dozen Israeli Jewish and Palestinian citizens dead. In order not to violate basic human rights, I refrained from conducting interviews with the attackers who were jailed, as these were not conducive conditions for a free and honest conversation. All of those incarcerated, however, gave a clear statement of their motives to the press and were very open about their socio-economic background and overall biographies. It was highly important for me to gather all this information from open sources, even with the knowledge that direct interviews could have solidified this research further. Methodologically, this is both textual and contextual research. The texts are the declarations of the stabbers immediately after they were caught. The context is their biographies as individuals and as a group. I used a group biography, as well as the common features of all the stabbers. These were quite telling: 48 out of the 50 were single, 45 were men and 43 were temporary, unskilled, underpaid workers in Israel. The dominant factor in their life was not their religious identity. They were Muslims, but it seems that self-reference in their case, and one assumes in the case of most of those who lived at the time in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, was their national identity. They were Palestinians who, like so many other Palestinians then and now, could not find work in the occupied territories.

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VIOLENCE AND ISLAM

The study of political Islam has recently developed beyond the essentialist approach so dreaded by Edward Said in his Orientalism. Several edited compilations and books showed how varied and multifarious was the phenomenon named Islamic 2 Fundamentalism. The interjection of religion into one’s individual or collective identity took all kinds of forms: from political parties adhering to a strict application of the scriptures to pop music inspiring young people to find confidence and self-assertiveness in an alien world. Even political parties in places such as Tunisia and Turkey could not be lumped together with the Islamic republic in Iran or the Wahhabi Saudi dynasty in the Arabian Peninsula. Each case study had to be studied in its own context, and the vaguer the picture scholars depicted, the closer they probably were to the reality on the ground. In one area, however, the research stalled somewhat, and this was in the analysis of violence in the name of political Islam, partly due to the inhibition in the USA after 9/11 to deal with ‘core issues’. But the main reason maybe more intuitive than cognitive. It was difficult to engage academically with acts of individuals depicted in mainstream media and politics as exceptionally inhuman and always as if they were more gruesome than the death caused by modern weaponry used by conventional armies against civilians. So for many, it seems the late Eli Kedourie’s assumption that violence in the Middle East is the inevitable result of Arab political culture and Islam is still valid in the eyes of many even today. 3 This article is written under the assumption that the same processes that produce violence in Los Angeles, Bogota, Delhi and Johannesburg are at work in the Middle East in general, and Palestine in particular. The first pioneering work ahead of many others to come was the collection Joel Beinin and Joe Stork, Political Islam, (Berkeley, 1996). 3 Elie Kedourie, Democracy and the Arab Political Culture, (London, New York, 1994). 2

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The impulse for violence in all these locations is born out of socio-economic deprivation. The lone actor directs his or her violence against others not because of their different or alien religious or national identity but because of the actions or behaviour of that other’s leadership, government or state has taken against them. In the case discussed in these pages, Palestinians attacked ‘Jews’ according to their own narrative. When one examines more closely this definition, one can see that it includes anyone identified as a citizen of Israel (hence some of the victims were Palestinian citizens of Israel). The national and religious narratives provide justification for challenging the deprivation with violence. It would have been much more useful to look for the core reasons for this kind of violence in the discipline of criminology than Orientalism. Criminologists distinguish between several theoretical explanations for violence, none of which are religious. There are sociological, biological and psychological causes. A comprehensive approach would require relying on the scholarly consensus in all these disciplines. Historians who wrote on the history of violence felt more comfortable with the sociological approach. Within the sociological approach there was space also for the economic background and the socialisation of the individual, which became a political culture of a sort. I felt also more comfortable within this approach. But what is important is that whatever approach one takes for studying violence in the Middle East and in Palestine, it should be studied with the help of universal methodology and not a particularistic one. One clear conclusion emerging from the study of violence is the link between socio-economic realties and the violent impulse. Already in the 1920s and the 1930s, scholars in the USA showed how this link works in the slums of the big cities: more violent members of the society were inflicted by higher levels of unemployment and absence of social services compared to the rest of the population. Every now and then, there is an attempt to finetune the definition of the more violent members of the society according to the ethnic and racial yardstick, with the danger of confusing the causes – the policies from above – and the consequence, the fact that these policies are enacted in particular ethnic communities.

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 201 The conversation on the origins of violence continues but one distinct inference can be deduced which is relevant to the case study introduced here. Anyone who was content in relating Palestinian violence in the occupied territories and beyond to the texts written by Hamas or sermons delivered by preachers in mosques displays a reductionist and unhelpful approach to this issue. It is very clear from research in the Third World that violence decreased with the rise of standards of living and employability, and not because an allegedly revolutionary discourse disappeared from the scene. 4 The picture however in Palestine is much more complex. Successive Israeli governments will claim they are willing to grant such economic conditions, what Prime Minister of recent years, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the ‘economic peace’: should the Palestinians give up their national rights and aspirations they would be rewarded with economic prosperity. This is a false assumption. The reason Palestinians are discriminated against economically is not their unwillingness to give up their national aspirations, but rather the inability of the hegemonic ideology of the Jewish State to grant equal economic and social rights to non-Jews. Therefore, land will still be Judaized under economic peace, Jews will be preferred and exclusively employed in industry that is connected to national security and the distribution of resources will be the same as before, with a clear set of privileges to a Jewish citizen in a Jewish state. Archeologically speaking, therefore, we can say that beneath the socio-economic deprivation layer rests the ideological layer of the Israeli settler, colonial, ethnic state.

A very concise introduction to the topic can be found in S.H. Kadish, Encyclopaedia of Crime and Justice, 4 Volumes, 1983. For a sociological explanation on crime see A. Keith Bottomley, Criminology in Focus: Past Trends and Focus Prospects, 1979. An interesting attempt to apply these theories to violence in Islamic societies can be found in J.N.D Anderson, ‘Homicide in Islamic Law’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 13/4, pp. 811–812. 4

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THE SOCIO-ECONOMIC BACKGROUND

Most of the random stabbers went through the Israeli labour market, which in 1989 absorbed about 140,000 workers who commuted daily to Israel from the occupied territories. The Palestinian workers who arrived in Israel experienced the overall oppressive and abusive reality, as did all the other Palestinians. Most Palestinians responded in a cognitive way thorough talking and writing and in some cases with the occasional protest or demonstration. Violence in the name of an idea can usually be orchestrated and motivated by a powerful organization such as an army, police force or a paramilitary outfit. An individual act of desperation is motivated by a fusion of several factors that distinguish the lone actor from the rest of population. The fusion of a particularly hard socio-economic reality, with a certain mental disposition and exposure to motivating texts can produce the rare circumstances in which even a normative person temporarily is driven into a wild chase of whoever stands in his or her way. As we shall see in most cases, the phase of the attack was very short and the behaviour within its span of time was very different from the attacker’s conduct before and after the deed. The daily integration into the Israeli labour market on Israel’s streets is a trajectory that led the workers to a road juncture or intersection where they congregate until, if they were lucky enough, potential employers collected them, or at least they found an employer for the day. They arrived there after leaving their homes before the crack of dawn and after queuing for hours at checkpoints. Palestinians working in Israel were not allowed to use public transport to get to their place of work and could only stay for the purpose of work. This trajectory and daily experience in the case of the lone actors helped to translate abstract ideas about national resistance and religious redemption into action. Since 1991, entry into Israel required a permit to move, issued by the Israeli Civil administration in the occupied territories. This body was established in 1981, ostensibly to replace the military rule but in essence fulfilling the same role and adopting the same policies. The permit is either daily or for a fixed period of time. There was a need for another permit to work. The workers from the Gaza Strip, in an ominous sign of things to come, were required to acquire a magnetic card. The Gaza workers had to pay for the card in what the locals named ‘the tax of life’. It was a trap.

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 203 Once you had the card, it enabled the Israeli authorities to link to your accounts and bills, and only if you paid all your fines, taxes and whatever the occupier came up with, could you purchase and keep the card. 5 An added frustration in this trajectory was the high possibility of being arrested by the Israeli police on the way to work. According to the Israeli NGO, Kav La-Oved, the arrests were explicit cases of harassment, as most of those interned held valid permits to work in Israel. A Palestinian worker had no right to resist arrest through the services of a lawyer, as an Israeli citizen would be entitled to, and therefore the workers were immediately transferred to the jailhouse. They were at first detained for 48 hours in the West Bank and then jailed in the infamous Ansar 2 prison in Gaza. Their permits were confiscated and heavy fines were imposed on them. Most of the ‘stabbers’ had a valid permit but not a permanent job so one can assume they all went through this via dolorosa every time they crossed into Israel and returned. 6 In 1992, 70,000 Palestinian workers from the occupied territories were registered with the Israeli employment agency. According to a ministerial committee decision from 1970, registered workers were entitled to the same wages as Israeli workers. But even this group (half of the work force from the occupied territories at the time) did not, in practice, enjoy the same social rights granted to Israeli workers, sometimes at the same workplace. They were still better off than the other half of the work force. This other half, which belonged to the work force in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the period under review here, were slaves by every historical, moral or economic definition. The more fortunate workers were thus those registered. But even they were not immune from collective sacking. In December 1992, in the wake of the closure and curfew imposed on the occupied The most reliable source for this trajectory is the Israeli NGO, Kav LaOved (The Worker’s Hoteline). Before the age of the Internet, they had a monthly information sheet. The data here are from the September 1992 issue. 6 Ibid. 5

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territories, a large number of workers were sacked without unemployment compensation or social security benefits. This increased the level of unemployment in the early 1990s in the Gaza Strip to forty per cent. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinians had no alternative employment avenues opened to them and they were left with no sources of living. Even if one cannot establish a direct link between the frequent waves of sacking and the stabbers, one does notice the coincidence of the increase in the frequency of massive sacking and the rise in the number of violent attacks between December 1992 and March 1993. The peace process stopped it for a while before it proved to be an illusion. The desperation from unfulfilled promises of liberation and prosperity triggered a different mode of violence, more organized and more lethal: that of the human suicide bombs. Job losses were not only caused by closures. The absence of any regulating hand enabled employers to sack workers collectively and at will. Also in such cases, the fired workers did not get any compensation. Thus, for instance, in August 1988, thirty Gazan workers were sacked from the textile plant Agraman, in the town of Yavneh, without any compensation. Only the intervention of the Israeli NGO, Kav La-Oved and its appeal to the court enabled the workers to receive some sort of compensation. When a plant was closed, such as happened with another textile factory, Adert Shomron, in 1990, its fifty Palestinian workers did not receive any compensation. 7 By now the reader probably understands the rule in those days: sacking was always whimsical, immediate and hardly ever followed by compensation or justification. The particular link we make between the socio-economic realities and the violence explains why there were no academics, traders or farmers among the stabbers. The common denominator for these groups was not their level of education, as some would argue, but the geographical location of their employment. Unlike the workers, these other groups did not need to enter Israel, as least not frequently, and therefore were not exposed to the saga of humiliation that the workers underwent through the checkpoint via dolorosa. After the Oslo accord was signed, the system of 7

Ibid., June 1992 report.

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 205 checkpoints and the humiliation accompanying it was transferred into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and thus Palestinians from all walks of life would be affected by it. Hence, the background of the suicide bombers of the second half of the 1990s is very different from the group under review here, and included students and professionals. In those days, the Palestinian worker could not survive without a salary from Israel and therefore became the prime victim of the occupation, experiencing a triple oppression: national, social and economic.

THE PROFILE OF A STABBER

Two cases in a way indicated to the Israelis that they were facing a wave – a phenomenon – rather than exceptional cases of violence. The first one was a stabbing case involving a minor from Gaza (his name was not disclosed) who stabbed an Israeli citizen named Shalom Stabi in November 1990. To the policemen who arrested him, he explained that he wanted to retaliate for the treatment Palestinians were receiving at checkpoints. 8 Not many of the stabbers used this argumentation, but almost all of them underwent the same trajectory experienced by this young man. Even a more famous case was that of Ashraf Ba’aluji from Gaza. He was nineteen years old when, together with another friend, he killed three Israeli citizens, Yehoshua Hakmaz, Iris Asraf and Moshe Ivan, in Jaffa on December 4, 1990. He told Maariv, the Israeli daily, that just a short time before he went on the rampage, two Israeli members of the National Guard abused him. He claimed that eventually the two had robbed him of his money. Ba’aluji added that in another incident, just before the attack, an Israeli driver tried to run him over. It is quite possible that Ba’aluji did not undergo all these experiences he described, but they are part and parcel of the daily trajectory of many Palestinians. 9 The intriguing question emerging for these two case studies and others that will be described here, is why, out of 140,000 Palestinian workers who underwent this trajectory, did only fifty 8 9

Baya Feldman’s report in the daily Hadashot, 25 March 1991. Maariv, 15 December 1990.

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resorted to this kind of a reaction? In order to answer this I have tried to sketch a profile of the stabber. I found three features in the biographies of those who took part in the stabbing attacks against Jews, and in some cases also against Palestinian citizens of Israel. These three features constitute the additional burden, or experience, in the life of the workers that either were less present, or non-existent, in the case of their coworkers. All of them of course share the same socio-economic background of being subjected to the Israeli ‘slave market’ of Palestinian workers. The three characteristics are: a particular personal predicament, the return to religion and the mental constitution of the stabber.

EXTRA PERSONAL PREDICAMENT

This particular predicament was a calamity that befell the stabber on top of the more conventional tragedy of losing one’s workplace. It could be despair from a more general deterioration in a family’s financial fortunes due to closures or a rise in unemployment. It could be caused by the killing, wounding or abuse of the stabber himself or a relative. The Israeli daily Maariv reported that in the stabbing incidents up to March 1991 the most common explanation given by the attackers was a wish to exact revenge for the Israeli killing or abuse of relatives or friends. 10 The personal predicament can also be political. Some of the stabbers claimed they did it to exonerate the suspicion of collaboration with the Israeli occupation. This explanation was more common from people who identified themselves as members of recognized political organizations. 11 Sometimes the exoneration was sought not for accusations of collaboration but for other kinds of defaming and shaming. This was more common in the case of women who were among the stabbers. A young girl of fifteen from the village of Bituniyaa, near Ramallah in the West Bank, told her interrogators that she stabbed a tourist in Jerusalem since she wanted to prove to everyone she 10 11

Maariv, 23 March 1991. Ibid.

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 207 was sane after she had been reputed as the ‘crazy one’ in her village. Her cousin joined her in the action and the two used a kitchen knife and razor blade. 12 Young men too employed similar narratives. Dia al-’Ara, a seventeen-year-old boy from Khan Yunis in the Gaza Strip, killed Amazia Ben Haim in the Jewish settlement Ganei Tal to prove he was not the ‘village madman’. A day before, he was hit by his father in front of his younger brothers. He also had an older brother incarcerated in Ketziot. 13 However, this was not a common explanation. The more common one was a narrative that enumerated a number of incidents that had an accumulative effect of over burdening an already impossible life. A trajectory that often included loss of work, constant humiliation by whoever represented the occupation and financial desperation that eventually boiled out and translated into a spontaneous decision to act. The following examples show that, at least in the narrative of the stabber, out of the incidents, one aspect was always mentioned as most prominent. In many cases, the last straw was the loss of one’s job. The most publicized case associated with job loss was that of Ziad Salameh, a nineteen-year-old Gazan worker who killed two people in Jaffa in 1993. His neighbours in Gaza told the Israeli daily Haaretz that Salameh was depressed because he could not make a living. His brother was arrested for membership in the Islamic Jihad in 1991. His cousin told Haaretz that on the week of the killing, Ziad was beaten by Israeli soldiers in the street while everyone was watching. The cousin summed it up: ‘the oppression, the pressure and the economic despair of a ten-member family has brought him to act the way he did’. 14 Fawaz Muhammad A’marin, a nineteenyear-old Palestinian from the refugee camp Nusairat in the Gaza Strip, who killed Helena Rap in the city of Bat-Yam on May 24, 1992, also associated his act with his inability to find work. 15 Yeidot Achronot, 16 June 1991. Maariv, 16 October 1992. 14 Haaretz, 2 March 1993. 15 Al-Hamishmar, 25 May 1992. 12 13

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In other cases, it was the abuse suffered by a relative that triggered the action. A typical case was that of Muhammad Mustafa Hasan Abu-Jallah from the Jabbalya camp in the Gaza Strip, who stabbed four women (Bela Levitzky, Rosa al-Yasfour, Margaret Benita and Miram Biton) to death at a bus stop in the western Jerusalem neighbourhood of Qiryat Yovel. 16 He avenged the killing of his cousin, Husayn, who was shot by the army while demonstrating in the Gaza Strip. The central event can sometimes, at least as it appears in the narrative, be more mundane. In November 1991, a twenty-seven year-old woman attempted to stab a border police officer in Jerusalem. In her interrogation, she said she was pushed towards such an action because of a dispute with her family. Mahmoud Muselmani, of Tubas in the West Bank, who also assaulted a border policeman, told a similar story. 17

RETURN TO ISLAM

In the late 1980s, a large number of people all over the Middle East underwent what might be called an identity crisis, as they were, in a way, embroiled in a conundrum that began in the late eighteenth century and is still with us today. The crisis was caused by tension between past adherence to a traditional value system and practices of Islam (and of other religious systems) and a new set of ideas arriving from the West. People’s reaction to the tension differed and a variety of responses to the challenge emerged: from a desire to be totally westernized to an impulse to cleanse their society of any Western influences. One suspects most people did not live according to any of these extreme responses, but somewhere in between. One hundred years into the early encounters, undeniably, a large number of people have chosen to return to religion as either a political or individual panacea to the crisis. The destructive impact of an accelerated economic modernization process left many sections of society worse off than they were in the past. Economic 16 17

Hadashot, 23 February 1992. Davar, 12 November, 1991.

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 209 polarization increased and was not helped by an attempt from above to install a westernized educational system that produced a generation of graduates who desperately, and in vain, sought jobs according to their qualifications. They could not reap the dividends even in societies whose macroeconomic performance has improved nor was it easy to be integrated into the administrative elites of their states. On top of that, in the 1980s migration from the countryside to urban centers reached new, record levels in the Middle East. In the process, social structures and traditional networks that comforted and sustained people were lost while the new political systems failed to provide adequate alternatives. 18 Since the1950s, this was compounded by an accelerated process of urbanization and industrialization, ambitious in nature, and destructive to most members of society in its consequences. The by-products of these processes were quick to show: belts of slums encircling major cities hosting an impoverished, unemployed, underemployed and desperate population. This was not unique, however, to the Middle East. All over the world, such a new, modern existence helped to enhance a return to religion, any religion, due to the failure of the secular, modern world to comfort or offer any hope for change. These processes were properly identified by political forces that used, cynically or genuinely, the impulse of a return to religion to power a political movement. In Egypt, this was done successfully in 1928 by the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which also had branches elsewhere, including in Palestine, and since 1967 in Israel. Their power was even further enhanced after 1967, when a secular, progressive, and at times messianic, pan-Arab ideology proved a failure not only in solving their socio-economic predicament but also in the struggle against Zionism. These processes occurred in occupied Palestinian areas as well. There, the destructive economic and social impoverishment was accompanied by other processes unique to that part of Palestine. One of them was the re-emergence of Palestinian See an exploration of these ideas in Ilan Pappe, The Modern Middle East, (London, New York, 2010). 18

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nationalism in the face of a protracted Israeli occupation that was transformed into a settler colonialist project. A counter force, springing out of the spread of political Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood variety, emerged with the help of Israel in the occupied territories. 19 The movement, Hamas, at first was regarded by Israel as a counter force to the secular Fatah movement and hence was encouraged and supported, before it became Israel’s nemesis. In this manner, mosques and charity organizations joined in, with Israel’s consent, with the remnants of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and created several political Islamic formations, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The natural growth, the increase in unemployment and the disappearance of employment choices inside Israel accelerated the national and political resistance to the occupation in the early 1980s. The resistance was met with a harsh and violent Israeli response. This reaction increased the number of people who underwent the trajectory of suffering and abuse within the system of the occupation. The first Intifada broke out as a direct response to this new kind of oppression. The uprising was also triggered by the indifference shown by the Arab world to the Palestinian problem (as was manifested in the November 1987 Arab summit in Amman, where the Palestinian issue hardly featured at all). And to this one can add the overall disappointment in the PLO’s inability to further in any way the liberation of the land or at least alleviate the predicament of the Palestinians under occupation. The Intifada brought in its wake a diplomatic process that reinvigorated in the occupied territories a new secular national elite that raised people’s expectations once more. Any perceived success it had, such as James Baker’s peace initiatives, the 1991 Madrid Conference and the rise of Labour back to government in Israel, solidified the power of this elite; any failure, such as the massive expulsions of hundreds of Hamas activists by the Rabin Labour government in 1992, a freeze in the diplomatic process and harsh See Andrew Higgins, ‘How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas’, The Wall Street Journal, 24 January 2009. 19

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 211 Israeli policies such as closures and curfews, pushed people instead into the alternative way of political Islam. The groups that channelled the return to Islam, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, provided the faithful with a relatively clear political rational: the national secular methodology has totally failed, hence it is time to give the alternative political Islamic way a chance. The new way was explicitly endorsing an armed struggle as part of its agenda, a struggle it claimed the secular forces had abandoned. Its manifestoes used Qurʾanic references to Jews from the early Islamic period, applying them to present day Israelis. It was also committed to uprooting collaborators and to disseminating the belief that death in the service of the struggle ensured life in heaven for the believer. However, as I have tried to show elsewhere, the main message of Hamas and Jihad pamphlets was not religious but rather national and a close reading of their texts indicated that the reference to Jews is a reference to Israelis, and the actions against Israelis were a response to what Israelis did and not to who they were. As the leader and founder of Hamas, Shakyh Yassin, put it: Hamas would oppose any occupier, even he was a Muslim. 20 The authors of this new dogma came from a variety of backgrounds and their loyalty to their own discourses and texts was expressed with different levels of conviction. Pragmatic activists worked alongside genuine religious scholars, helped quite often by more opportunistic former members of the secular outfits. The impulse for more violent resistance and action was still a Palestinian political conundrum, but the method and tools were Islamic. This seems to be the nature of political Islamic violent action in the last bit of the 20th century all around the Middle East. So far, one can note that where political Islamic groups were successful, the tolerance towards former allies in a national struggle weakened and more dictatorial forms of governance appeared. But while the struggle continues, there is a wide coalition of people who did not necessarily support the dogma, or returned to religion, but were willing nonetheless to give a chance to an alternative way. Ilan Pappe, ‘Islamism and Nationalist Leaflets, 1920s–1980s’, in Muslim-Jewish Encounters, Intellectual Traditions and Modern Politics, Eds. R. Nettler, Suha Taji-Farouki, (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 87–108. 20

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The lone stabber, however, seemed less concerned with articulating the political or religious reality. He or she was busy searching for an outlet from a predicament of an on-going personal nature, or as an indirect result from protracted oppression. Therefore, it is possible that a clear-cut message either preached in the mosque or published in a pamphlet assisted in crystallizing a decision to act. Most of the stabbers did not come from an educated class and hence complex texts would probably have been discarded; neither did their daily struggle for survival leave much time, or patience, for attending to complicated texts, which usually accompanied more pragmatic, and less violent, suggestions for action in the face of the oppression. It seems at the height of the struggle during the first Intifada, the leaders of the Islamic movements themselves were quite impatient towards complex messages and this is where the world of the lone attackers and the messages of the political movements converged. This was not always the case before the 1980s. Leaders and thinkers of political Islam encouraged the society to accept a complex and pragmatic interpretation of the sacred texts when facing the challenge of the West. Thus for instance, Jihad was articulated mainly as a personal struggle against temptations, materialist seduction and the allures of modern society. Among many Shiite sects this was not just a personal recommendation; it was part and parcel of a survival kit in communities living under Sunni hegemony. It seems that quite a few of the lone stabbers were at one time or another in their short life under the influence of political Islamic groups. But it is noteworthy that none of them was content in providing purely a religious explanation for their actions. They all added a narrative about their social and economic predicament and a trajectory of Israeli abuse. A handful only stressed a response to the call to become martyrs in the name of Islam as their motive. And as stressed before, very few of them were members of political Islamic groups: they were lone actors in the desperate theatre of death and life of Palestine. The outfits added their share by producing the political atmosphere that encouraged and justified the actions. My contention here that even when later on in the case of the suicide bombers and the lone actors in recent years in Europe, a religious narrative seems to be more dominant, it is still

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 213 worthwhile looking into the deeper layers of depression and confusion that motivated an individual to attack. The stabbers were hailed as heroes when this kind of action began. Graffiti on refugee camp walls depicted them as martyrs and this too may have added to a permissive atmosphere. But slogans on a wall, like pamphlets or sermons, have little impact where depravation and despair are absent. It is therefore important to distinguish between the economic and social circumstances that pushed people to desperate actions and the mechanisms that justify these actions as the exclusive response to one’s predicament. The essentialist approach that stressed ‘Arab political culture’ or ‘Islam’ as the prime cause for this kind of violence does not hold water in this case (a similar analysis was at times provided to explain the killing of collaborators in the first and second Intifadas). The percentage of those choosing a violent response in the face of a continued oppression in the occupied territories is negligible, even among the workers themselves. Moreover, the culture of killing and violence is first and foremost the outcome of the occupation. Daily killings of Palestinians by Israelis produce as much an atmosphere of violence as the discourse of resistance. Most of those killed in the late 1980s were unarmed demonstrators, among them women and children. One does not underestimate the absence of a democratic history of the occupied society, but it seems to play a secondary role. The factor of political Islam can also be traced in a different manner, when dramatic developments in the country or the region were interwoven into the narrative of explanation. Thus some of the stabbers related the indiscriminate Israeli killings of worshipers in al-Aqsa in 1990 as a motive in their action (in the autumn of 2014 and winter of 2015, lone actors ran over Jewish citizens with cars and bulldozers and some explained their act as a response to the rumoured Israeli plans to build under Haram al-Sharif and endanger its foundations and solidity). The massacre in 1990 made international headlines and shattered Palestinian society as a whole. Omar Said Abu-Sirhan, from the village of Ubadya near Bethlehem and nineteen years old, killed Iris Azoulay, Eli Altraz and Shalom (Charlie) Shlush in the Baqa neighbourhood in Jerusalem in October 1990. He explained his act as a response to the massacre in Haram al-Sharif and he wanted to become a Shahid and avenge al-Aqsa. Rifat Khalil Hamaduna, the only student among the fifty

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stabbers, a twenty-year-old, attacked Natan Hasaid and Yizhak Fitusi in Ashkelon in November 1990. Two of his closest friends were killed in demonstrations that followed the al-Aqsa massacre. Ripples of this event continued to feature in the narratives of the stabbers even later on. In May 1992, Adnan al-Efendy, from the refugee camp Dehayishe, stabbed a teenager in the centre of Jerusalem. In court, he told the judge that he did it because of what happened in al-Aqsa. 21 When the Americans kicked off the Madrid peace process in 1991, there was an attempt by political Islamic groups to encourage violent responses in the street in order to thwart the accord. One can recall the few instances when members of groups such as the ‘Red Vultures’ or ‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades’ used the same primitive weapons, such as kitchen knives, to assault Israeli Jewish civilians in a more organized stabbing. This in turn could have encouraged a younger impressionable population to view the stabbing as a heroic act in the service of the resistance. When the Oslo accord was signed, it was viewed at least in the first immediate year as a genuine opening for a better future. In that year, the violence of this kind subsided significantly. But two years into the process, its false promise was exposed and the violence returned with a vengeance and the potential lone attacker was recruited to a more desperate line of action of becoming human bombs in the service of the resistance.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTOR

This piece is not written by a professional psychologist and hence there is no pretence here for such an analysis. I am contending here that a common profile of crime preformed against the background of poverty and deprivation is a satisfactory analytical framework in our case study. The mental faculty of the stabber can be an additional factor explaining why an individual in an oppressed society translates the predicament into a violent action and another individual is content with voicing protest or demonstrating, but nothing more than that. 21

Hadashot, 15 May 1992.

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 215 In most cases that we examined, the stabber was not attacking a person he or she knew. Thus, this was a random attack that can only be described in terms of an amok frenzy: a certain traumatic phase of ecstasy of death and killing. This phase can continue, according to the testimonies of the stabbers themselves, from one day to two weeks. Within this period, the stabbers, who were otherwise not mentally imbalanced, leave aside consideration of cost and benefit. The possibility that the stabber’s life will change indefinitely as a result of the action and the potential success of the operation were not part of the consideration and decision making process during the period of this ecstasy. An example for this process is the case of A’aid Nasser, a twenty-one-year-old who stabbed a Jewish famer from the settlement Sdeh Trumot with whom he had no previous contact or acquaintance. When he was arrested, he waved the victory sign and said, ‘I went out this morning with a knife and decided to stab the first Jew I will meet’. 22 But even when the victim was someone the stabber knew for a short or longer period, the same loss of rational decision-making seemed to take place. Thus, for instance, when a Palestinian worker stabbed Yoram Abargil from the settlement Brosh, he did it when the victim came to collect him from his refugee camp, Dahaiya. He explained later on that he decided that morning that he would stab the first Jew who will enter the camp. 23 The blind attack, as happened elsewhere, did not spare a Jewish ambulance team that came to treat wounded people in a collapsed house in the Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sur Bahr. 24 It is not easy to detect the eruption of the ecstasy. Some of the stabbers mentioned a dream that transformed their cognition and pushed them to act the way they did. Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon interviewed in the party’s paper, al-ʿAhd, also mentioned dreams as a catalyst in their motivation to act. The dreams usually seem to have a religious content and quite often it is the prophet who reveals himself to the dreamers and encourages them to act, or Maariv, 17 June 1991. Maariv, 10 February 1992. 24 Yediot Achronot, 20 June 1991. 22 23

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at times it can be a relative who was killed by the Israelis. Thus, for instance, a fifteen year-old boy who was caught with two knives in his possession while passing by a group of Jewish youth in Jerusalem in March 1991, told his interrogators he wanted revenge by killing Jews since his relative who was killed in the Intifada appeared in his dream. 25 According to the stabbers’ testimonies, their lives were quite normal up to the night of the dream. The dream provided the pretext for an act regardless of its consequences. This is why random acts are impossible to pre-empt or predict. Some mentioned that Friday prayers and sermons strengthened the elements that appeared in the dreams. Thus for instance, Mahmoud Muslemani, nineteen years old, whom I already mentioned as someone who justified his act as a wish to exonerate a family feud, explained that his rampage began after leaving alAqsa mosque after a Friday prayer and he stabbed the first border policeman he encountered. This is why there seemed to be an increase in actions like this during the month of Ramadan when there is a sublimation of the dream’s mystical affects. The close observation of the post-event behaviour of the stabber is crucial for drawing the line between the recruited members of political Islamic groups willing to act violently in the name of the organization or the ideal, and the random actor. This can clearly be seen when we follow closely the stabber’s conduct before and after the act. The stabbing began almost instantly when the stabber arrived at the location, quite often the workplace, or a place where work was sought. There were no preparations. The stabber did not organize a means of escape. Many of them were reported to undergo a kind of an awakening, or sobering, process at the end and return to normal patterns of behaviour. The waking up from the fantasy, which is described almost as a hypnotic process, was accompanied by growing sense of fear and apprehension that was totally absent while the stabbing occurred. In the case of Adnan al-Effendi, mentioned above, the sobering was even more extraordinary. When he ended his attack, he was sheltered by an ultra-orthodox Jewish woman defending 25

Yediot Achronot, 29 March 1991.

7. OPPRESSION, NATIONALISM AND ISLAM IN PALESTINE 217 him from being lynched by a mob. In this respect, it is interesting to recall the opinion, as unprofessional as it had been, of this woman. She told the press the stabber seemed to her ‘to be doped, but not from drugs but from brainwashing’. She then observed fear returning to his face. Eyewitnesses in other incidents reported similar patterns of behaviour. The fear for their own life, or that of their loved ones, or terrified about being lynched by a mob, settled in after the amok attack was over. 26 Finally, almost all the stabbers supplied an explanation and a motive. In some cases, they refused to do so and the Israeli press described them as insane (which are the common references to lone Jews who committed similar acts against Palestinians over the years). Thus, Muhammad Masarweh, who axed a Jewish woman in Netanya, struggled to provide an explanation for his actions. He mentioned only that he was a regular visitor to a mosque in Jaffa. He was also the only one who came from within Israel, the town of Taybeh, and in a way, was treated almost as a Jewish stabber. 27

CONCLUSION

The archetypal stabber was a hard-working labourer, single, who was exposed also to political Islamic rhetoric, but in most cases had no direct affiliation to any political Islamic groups. He, and in some cases she, underwent a similar trajectory of abuse on the way to a slave labour market in Israel, although in most cases possessed a permit to work inside Israel. Sixty per cent of the stabbers were from the refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. All the stabbers were young, between 16 and 30. None of them had any criminal record or were known to the police in any way. None of them belonged to any group defined in Israel as a ‘terrorist’ group. The Israeli government responded by first closing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for very long periods and then limiting drastically the number of permits for Palestinian workers. Anyone who fit the overall statistics of the stabbers was prevented from

26 27

Yediot Achronot, 15 May 1992. Hadashot Netanya, 19 July 1991.

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entering: single, male, from Gaza and a refugee. 28 The level of stabbings did not drop though in the first year after these restrictions were introduced. It was only the Oslo accord that brought a temporary respite from desperate acts of individuals. The socio-economic realities produced by the occupation pushed these individuals to do what they did. The direct or indirect link between national oppression and these realities intensified the sense of hopelessness and a wish to act. In the past, left wing ideologies provided a conceptual framework for connecting all the dots and justifying a priori or post-factum a violent act. The disappointment from these and other secular ideologies, identified in any case with the oppressor, allowed certain political Islamic dogmas to substitute them. The socio-economic and national realities of Palestine have not only remained the same, they continued to deteriorate exponentially. As in the case of assaults in the West since the beginning of this century, an analysis that focuses on the texts that these loners read, listened to or watched, with total disregard to the context in which they receive it, is going to prove futile both academically and existentially. Transforming the realities of immigrants in Europe or Palestinians in the occupied territories is possible. Expecting all of them to be irresponsive and complacent is impossible. Expertise on actions that seemed to be motivated by political Islam, or justified by it, cannot be based on classical orientalism alone (namely, knowledge of the Islamic scripts or even familiarity with modern day Middle Eastern history). Political economy, critical sociology and a more holistic approach to the way researchers analyse other human beings offer much better methodologies and tools for understanding the despair behind an act that, we should all be reminded, pales in comparison, on every level, to the violence inflicted by states and national armies with narratives that one can be as suspicious of, and object to, if not more, than in the cases described here. An interview with the Chief of Police in Al-Hamishmar, 27 February 1991. 28

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

J.N.D Anderson, ‘Homicide in Islamic Law’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 13/4, pp. 811–812. Joel Beinin and Joe Stork (eds.), Political Islam, (Berkeley, 1996). A. Keith Bottomley, Criminology in Focus: Past Trends and Focus Prospects, (London, 1979). Franz Fanon, The Wretched Upon Earth, (London, 2005). Andrew Higgins, ‘How Israel Helped to Spawn Hamas’, The Wall Street Journal, 24 January 2009. Sanford H. Kadish (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Crime and Justice, 4 Volumes, (New York, 1983). Elie Kedourie, Democracy and the Arab Political Culture, (London, New York, 1994). Ilan Pappe, ‘Islamism and Nationalist Leaflets, 1920s–1980s’, in Muslim-Jewish Encounters, Intellectual Traditions and Modern Politics, Eds. R. Nettler, Suha Taji-Farouki, (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 87–108. ———, The Modern Middle East, (London, New York, 2010).

8. SELF-SACRIFICE AND FORGIVENESS: RELIGION AND NATIONALISM IN THE NEW ISRAELI AND PALESTINIAN CINEMA YAEL BEN-ZVI MORAD 1 Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent. [The centurion said] Truly, this was the Son of God. 2

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, we have witness a ‘return’ to the roots in religion and culture in the Middle East, amongst both Jewish and Muslim communities. Westernization, secularization and ultra-modernism give rise to various movements, some competing and conflicting, that offer a way back to ‘authentic’ Hebrew or Arab culture. This perception relates to family, religion, music, politics, education, conventional and alternative medicine, psychology and fashion. In Israel, alongside religion there is a movement back to ethnic roots; especially Mizrachi (literally ‘eastern’) roots, but also Ashkenazi (European), as an alternative to Israeli Ashkenazi-Zionist hegemony. Some of these social, religious and ethnic movements Dr. Ben-Zvi Morad is a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. 2 Matthew 27:50–54. 1

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act as political forces, anti-colonial or post-colonial. It is a new-age mechanism connecting individuals to their roots and protecting them from the maladies of our time. Therefore, it is surprising to see how often Israeli and Palestinian cinema incorporate Christian motifs. The nativity and especially the crucifixion, as well as elements of Christian art, are present in both Israeli and Palestinian cinema. These religious motifs particularly stand out in films dealing with the IsraeliPalestinian conflict. What does each side gain from the use of Christian elements? How are narratives of self-sacrifice integrated into the national narrative? This paper will examine expressions of religious self-sacrifice in contemporary Israeli and Palestinian cinema, in a broad cultural and national perspective.

SELF-SACRIFICE IN ISRAELI CINEMA: FROM THE BINDING TO THE CRUCIFIXION Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of. 3

The binding of Isaac is a covenant between the Hebrew People and the makom, a Hebrew word meaning both ‘place’ and ‘God’. It is a covenant in which God promises to multiply Abraham’s seed and give him the land. Abraham, loyal and obedient, takes Isaac to Moriah, binds him and swings the knife when the angel stops him, saying, ‘Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now, I know that thou fearest God’ (Genesis 22:12). Abraham saw ‘a ram caught in a thicket’ and sacrificed it instead (Genesis 22:13). The Angel called him again and said, ‘I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven… and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies’ (Genesis 22:17). Abraham’s acceptance of the divine creed earns him the right to the land. The sacrifice of his son is in fact self-sacrifice, since Isaac is considered his only, beloved son and since God had already promised Abraham to make him unto a nation, killing Isaac would 3

Genesis 22:2.

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prevent the realization of the blessing and his destiny. 4 Two elements in this story are the basis of the sacrifice ethos in Israeli cinema: the belief that self-sacrifice will bring national prosperity, victory and ownership of the land, and the possibility of sacrificing another as a substitute for self-sacrifice. The story of the binding of Isaac is at the heart of Jewish and Israeli culture, as the poet Yehudit Kafri wrote, ‘Into the beginnings of our dim genesis / this story seeps through / father / son / and the knife’. 5 The dominance of this myth in Israeli culture and its variations over the years is the subject of many scholarly works. 6 This section of the essay will examine the contemporary transition from the binding to a Christian narrative of sacrifice – the crucifixion – in Israeli cinema, and the national significance of this transition. Zionism began with self-sacrifice. The migrants of the Second and Third Aliyah (Jewish Zionist immigration to the Promised Land) in the early twentieth century sacrificed their body and soul for the homeland. They created a new secular-national religion, drawing from the Jewish Bible, socialism and modern nationalism. Their treatment of Judaism was conflicted. On one hand, Judaism was fundamental for the Zionist connection to the land: The Bible served as historical justification for settling in Israel and the longing for Zion after 2,000 years of exile were the motive for migration as well as rising anti-Semitism in Europe. On the other hand, Zionism See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Sylvia Walsh, (Cambridge, 2006). 5 Yehudith Kafri, “Bereshiyot” Glume of Summer, (Tel-Aviv, 1988), p. 7 [in Hebrew]. 6 Ruth Kartun-Blum, Profane Scripture: Reflection on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry, (Cincinnati, 1999); Ruth Kartun-Blum, The Sword of the Word: The Binding of Isaac in Israeli Poetry, (Tel-Aviv, 2013) [in Hebrew]; Yael S. Feldman, ‘Isaac or Oedipus? Jewish Tradition and the Israeli Akeda’, in Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies, eds. Cheryl Exum and Stephen Moore (Sheffield, 1998), pp. 159–189; Itay Harlap, ‘The Victimizer of a Good Will: Anxiety, Denial, and Guilt in the Television Serial ‘Parashat Ha-Shavu’a’’, Mikan, Ethics and Responsibility in Israeli Cinema, 13 (2013), pp. 84–105. 4

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aspired to free itself from religion since religion was connected to life in exile and the Jews’ inability to defend themselves against anti-Semitic attacks. Therefore, the halutzim (pioneers) aspired to relive biblical life and cast off European-Jewishness. These waves of aliyah also carried the flag of gender equality, and integrated women into agriculture and other labor, and therefore incurred resistance and boycotts from the Old Yishuv, the colonies’ founders and land owners, who refused to employ these young halutzim, and specifically the women. Yet they fought for the right to make a life for themselves in their homeland and many of them suffered from cold and hunger and became seriously ill due to poor living conditions. 7 One distinct visual expression of the self-sacrifice ethos is found in the short film This is the Land (Baruch Agadati, 1935). In one interesting sequence, the technique of dissolving images conveys double meaning. The first shot shows a halutz working in the field, collapsing to the ground and dying. In the following shot, a plow led by another halutz passes through the same field. Dissolve conventionally expresses chronological progress, but influenced by Soviet socialist cinema of the time, it also expresses ideological and technological progress. This meaning is emphasized by the last word shouted by the dying halutz: ‘Kadima!’ (Onward!). Yet there is another meaning here: the field is plowed over the pioneer’s dead body. His body is still on screen when the plow moves on, and thus it seems as if he is buried or absorbed in the field. It is as if the death of the halutz fertilizes the land. 8 Here, as in the binding of Isaac, human sacrifice is part of a holy covenant that binds the people to the Promised Land. Regarding sacrifice, gender and Hebrew poetry see Hamutal Tsamir, ‘The Pioneers’ Sacrifice, The Holy Land, and the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in the 1920s’, in A Moment of Birth: Studies in Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Honor of Dan Miron, Ed. Hannan Hever, (Jerusalem, 2007) [in Hebrew], pp. 645–673. 8 Ariel L. Feldestein, ‘Filming the Homeland: Cinema in Eretz Israel and the Zionist Movement, 1917–1939’, in Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, Ed. Miri Talmon, Yaron Peleg, (Austin, 2011), pp. 3–15. 7

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A later film, They were Ten (Baruch Dienar, 1960), about a commune of halutzim in a secluded place, ends in the death of the only women in the group after she gives birth; a new sabra generation is born, and in a rain ending a drought. According to Moshe Tzimerman, this is a recurring motif in Israeli cinema, where sacrificing a woman enables life in the homeland. 9 The first large scale war movie ever produced in Israel is Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), directed by the Briton Thorold Dickinson, and it tells of UN observers sent to draw the demarcation line between Israel and Jordan following the 1948 war and the termination of the British mandate. When they arrive at Hill 24, they find the bodies of four Israeli soldiers, one of whom is a woman. The movie tells the personal story of each soldier and his or her motive for joining the war through flashbacks. When the Israeli flag is discovered in the female soldier’s hand, Hill 24 is declared Israeli territory. In war movies, as in earlier films about halutzim, Jewish death is the basis for owning the land. Analyzing the massive presence of death in Israeli cinema, Meir Schnitzer claims that in the harsh living conditions of the first years of statehood, the preoccupation with death and nationality served as justification for ‘indulging’ in filmmaking. These themes also created a unique, local dramatic narrative. 10 Following Schnitzer, I would like to show that ‘national’ films discussing war and settlement are not homogeneous and that imagery of death has changed significantly. This change formed gradually after the SixDay War in 1967. The Six-Day War was considered a phenomenal success. A small army overcame many larger armies that surrounded the small young state, in only six days. Israel conquered considerable land and its economic and political situation was improved. Yet, buds of guilt and discomfort started to appear in Israeli cinema. This Moshe Tzimerman, Signs of Cinema: The History of the Israeli Film between 1896 and 1948, (Tel-Aviv, 2001) [in Hebrew]. See also Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film, (Tel-Aviv, 1993), p. 215 [In Hebrew]. 10 Meir Schnitzer, ‘Death Becomes Us’, Ha’aretz Gallery, December 19, 2014, p. 10 [in Hebrew]. 9

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discomfort aggravated over the years and became extreme in films from the 1980s onward, as films began directly discussing Israeli control over Palestinian population. These feelings of guilt and the inability to adjust to the new status of sovereign power effected the representation of death and self-sacrifice in Israeli cinema. This discomfort seeped back to a retroactive discussion of the 1948 war, for example, in the film He Walked Through the Fields (Yosef Millo, 1967), an adaptation of a 1947 novel by Moshe Shamir. It depicts the fight against British rule prior to 1948, but was produced close to the Six-Day War. The protagonist, a handsome kibbutznik and Palmach fighter named Uri, is portrayed by Assi Dayan, the son of the glorified Minister of Defense and former Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan. Uri is the first to be born in his kibbutz, the son of prominent Zionist figures. He farms the land and at the same time serves as a brave and admired commander in the Palmach, and he falls in love with Mika, a Holocaust survivor. After Mika discovers she is pregnant, Uri goes on a mission to sabotage a bridge where British soldiers cross. While he prepares the explosives, he thinks of Mika. He holds a bullet given to him by a Holocaust survivor who fought in the European underground, as a souvenir for his wife in case he dies in combat. In the background, a piano plays the romantic theme of his love for Mika. Uri stays under the bridge a second too long and dies in the explosion. A white light floods his face, frozen on screen. Gertz points out that Uri’s death in the battlefield may be a suicide brought on by the tension of conflicting values (farmer versus fighter, mature relationship versus wild manhood, etc.) or it may be a heroic death perpetuating Uri’s memory. 11 Applying Gertz’s theory to the issue of sacrifice, it would seem that Uri’s death marks the beginning of a shift in representations of death in Israeli cinema. While early Zionist films depicted death for a noble and ideological cause, just like Abraham’s absolute obedience to the divine creed, Uri’s death stems from conflict. He Walked Through the Fields portrays Uri as an individualistic hero, as opposed to earlier films focusing on Zionist groups. Casting Assi Dayan for the role (an exceptionally talented 11

Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction, pp. 91–92.

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actor and the son of a glorified general) created an image of the ideal Israeli man, a tough yet charming sabra. The fact that the film was an adaptation of a prize-winning novel, previously adapted to theatre, won it even greater prestige. Uri’s enigmatic-heroic death made the character into an icon in Israeli culture. Uri’s conflicted death resonates the power struggle that led to the crucifixion of Jesus, and the focus on a single character is similar to the structure of the New Testament, focusing on Jesus and his life-story, as opposed to the Jewish Bible, which tells the story of a nation and its God. He Walked Through the Fields presents a single individualistic hero whose death, rather than arising from acceptance of a necessary sacrifice, redeems him and solves his conflicts. The dead hero is resurrected here as a cultural icon. Later in his career, Assi Dayan was not only an actor, but also an original and sharp director. Yet, self-destructive behavior damaged his good looks, image and work in every possible way: obesity, drug abuse, negative work relations and violent relationships. Nevertheless, he continued to act in cinema and television, write poems, songs and scripts and direct some of the most important Israeli films of the last decades, winning Israeli and international awards, until his death in 2014. His last films discussed death rituals and ceremonies in an obsessive manner, specifically Dr. Pomerantz (2012) and Mr. Baum (1997). His complex film Life According to Agfa (1991) depicts a microcosm of Israeli society in a Tel-Aviv pub, where one night, men and women, Tel-Aviv bohemians, soldiers, Arabs, a police officer, a group of Mizrachi drug addicts and one lost kibbutznik woman, all come together. This encounter leads to the suicide of the kibbutznik after she suffers sexual abuse, a fight between the Mizrachi, Arabs and the police officer and, finally, the killing of the pub owner, his Arab employees and their guests by the soldiers. According to this apocalyptic vision, the Zionist center – the kibbutz – is lost and nears its end. The new Israeli center – Tel Aviv – is an urban bubble in which Arabs are used by their Ashkenazi employer and humiliated by Mizrachi racists, who in turn are humiliated and estranged by the Ashkenazi center. In the end, Israel Defense Forces cause the death of Israeli society itself: Arabs and

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Jews, Ashkenazim and Mizrachim. This symbolizes the danger of becoming a militarist society. 12 In the end, when a young Arab worker is shot, he spreads his arms and his blood leaves a cross like mark on the wall behind him. The massacre scene soundtrack features the song ‘Who by Fire’, by Leonard Cohen, a Jewish Canadian singer-songwriter, musician and poet. The lyrics list different ways human beings might meet their death, for example: ‘who by fire, who by water / who in the sunshine / who in the nighttime’. The song was inspired by the Hebrew prayer ‘Untannah Tokef’ recited on the Jewish New Year and on Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), in which one asks God for forgiveness and to be sentenced to life in the new year. The Jewish liturgy returns to the film through Western mediation: the words are English and the cinematic context is of salvation through sacrifice, echoing Jesus’s redemptive death. The film ends in a new clear day rising over Tel Aviv. The film first turns from black and white to color, when the camera pans from photos of the pub at night, hanging in the waitress’s apartment, to an ugly urban view. The soldiers also shoot an Agfa camera and a tape recorder sounding Cohen’s song, and in that sense, they sacrifice the art of sound and film: cinema. In this reflexive statement, Dayan both creates cinema and shatters it as a golden calf sacrificed in order to create a new, cleaner reality. Many Israeli films about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the 1980s onward, end in the death of a peace activist by extremists, Jewish or Arab. Clear examples for this are The Silver Platter (Judd Ne’eman, 1984) and The Smile of the Lamb (Shimon Dotan, 1986). Ella Shohat writes that these films are indeed sympathetic to the Palestinian perspective, but essentially, they deal with the suffering of leftist Israelis and present them as victims. 13 Regarding the film, see Moshe Tzimerman, The Israeli Invisible Movies, (Tel-Aviv, 2007) [in Hebrew]; Yael Ben-Zvi, ‘The Popular Model in Israeli Cinema of the 1990s: Sociological Factors’, Achshav, pp. 69–70 (2005), pp. 201–227 [in Hebrew]; Yael Ben-Zvi, ‘Center and Periphery in Israeli Cinema of the 1990s’, Alpayim, 30 (2006), pp. 248–256 [in Hebrew]. 13 Ella Shohat, Israeli Cinema: East/West and the Politics of Representation, (London, 2010). 12

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Furthermore, in a significant share of these films a new era begins with the death of the Israeli, expressed in images of a new dawn. In other words, the sacrifice of the Israeli in conflict films from the 1980s onward, results in a revival. Unsettled Land (Uri Barabash, 1987), like They Were Ten and Sabra (Alexander Ford, 1932), tells the story of a group of halutzim settled in a secluded area, dealing with conflict between militant and peace-seeking members of the group following Arab attacks, and conflicts about the group’s level of cooperation. The film ends with a funeral, when a group member is heard in voice-over reading from the collective journal: ‘At the price of suffering, we learned to forgive ourselves’. In this case, the death of an Israeli does not bring salvation, since clearly the bloody fight for the land continues. Like many other Israeli films, the filmmakers sacrifice the character in order to resolve the plot or create catharsis, cleansing the guilt the group members feel towards each other and towards the Arabs. The death of the Israeli has become a repetitive ‘ritual’ concluding many Israeli films. The sacrifice leads to forgiveness and leaves Israeli characters in the position of victims, despite their guilt. The original title of the film is Ha-Holmim (Dreamers), but switching two letters creates the word Ha-Mohlim (Forgivers). This may hint to the idea that the dream of Zionist settlement necessarily involves guilt and bloodshed and can only continue through self-absolution, and absolution is gained only through self-sacrifice or by sacrificing another. Udi Aloni’s film Forgiveness (2006) deals specifically with the desire for absolution following human sacrifice. The road to forgiveness for sacrificing another is a ‘via dolorosa’ of selfsacrifice. The film tells the story of David, a young American Jew, the son of a Holocaust survivor, who migrates to Israel and joins a combat unit of the IDF. During his service, he insists on treating the Palestinian population humanely, but the fear of an attack by an armed Palestinian lead him to shoot an innocent Palestinian girl. Subsequently, he suffers PTSD and is sent to a psychiatric hospital populated mostly by Holocaust survivors. The hospital was built on the ruins of the Palestinian village Deir Yassin, which was abandoned in 1948 after about 100 of its inhabitants were killed by Israeli forces. The treatment causes David to repress the killing, to the point of oblivion. Back in New York, he enters a relationship with a Palestinian woman, whose daughter Amal (‘hope’ in Arabic)

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keeps the key to the family house abandoned in 1948. In a psychotic episode, he almost murders his own father and then reenacts the repressed trauma of shooting the Palestinian girl. He threatens to murder Amal after begging her to give him the key, and eventually kills himself. David’s suffering and death testify to the ‘dead-end’ in which the Israeli political left finds itself, but it is also a road to salvation. The Hebrew words ‘burrow’ – mehila – and ‘forgiveness’ – meheela – are homophones. Gilgul Mehilot is the belief that all Jews who died in the diaspora will return to the holy land and resurrect when the Messiah comes. This literal and conceptual similarity is the base for the protagonist’s self-sacrifice; his death is akin to that of Jesus Christ as a Messiah whose sacrifice enabled resurrection, salvation and a new more moral existence. The attempt to take the key, symbolizes the attempt to control the land. In order to repress the crimes committed towards Palestinians in the past, the young Zionist man wants to commit another crime. These layers of repression are similar to the geographic repressing of the hospital, where the trauma of the Holocaust is pushed aside by hospitalizing survivors in a mental institute, and the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe, is pushed aside by erecting a hospital on the ruins of Deir Yassin. 14 Fantastically, the film continues after David’s death in a sort of resurrection or moral correction. He eventually remembers killing the Palestinian girl and recognizes his crime. Recognition of the crime follows a ceremony ‘orchestrated’ by Yakov, a Holocaust survivor nicknamed ‘Muselmann’, who is hospitalized in the psychiatric hospital. ‘Muselmann’ refers to the emaciated ‘non-men’ in Nazi death camps and means ‘Muslim’ in German. Thus, this term unites the Jewish trauma of the Holocaust and the Palestinian See an elaborate discussion of the film in Yael Munk, ‘Land, Man, Blood: On Forgiveness (Udi Aloni, 2006)’, South Cinema Notebook 2 On Destruction, Trauma & Cinema (2007), pp. 59–65 [in Hebrew]. See also Yael Ben-Zvi Morad, ‘Borders in Motion: The Evolution of the Portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Contemporary Israeli Cinema’, in Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, Eds. Miri Talmon-Bohm, Yaron Peleg, (Austen, 2011), pp. 276–293. 14

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trauma of the Nakba, buried under the hospital. In this ritual, the head of the hospital is strapped in a straitjacket, while the mentally ill conduct the ceremony. In this role reversal, what was buried underground is exposed and truth is revealed through madness. The ghost of a girl from the Deir Yassin massacre, identical to the Palestinian girl David killed and to Amal, clad in white, leads David underground. There he is stripped naked by patients/priests clad in white and is laid on an altar. A woman ‘priest’ pours water or oil from an ancient vessel on his head, baptizing or anointing him and Muselmann bleeds the palms of his hands. In biblical times, kings were anointed in oil, and David is the name of the illustrious king who, as a young warrior, defeated Goliath the Philistine, a name from which the later term ‘Palestine’ is derived. ‘Messiah’ literally means ‘anointed’ in Hebrew, and according to Jewish belief, the Messiah will be an offspring of King David. Bleeding David’s palm obviously echoes the crucifixion of Jesus who was ironically named ‘king of the Jews’. Light, fire and white garments all symbolize salvation gained by David’s anointment and crucifixion. In his book First Person Camera, Shmulik Duvdevani examines the connection between victimhood in documentaries from the 1980s onward, as well as guilt towards the Palestinian. His book analyzes personal documentary cinema, but in the epilogue, he discusses Forgiveness at length since he sees it as reflecting a transition in Israeli cinema from masking guilt with victimhood, to actively recognizing it. 15 In my opinion, this film does in fact recognize the guilt, takes responsibility for it and does not differentiate between settlement in 1948 and in 1967 onward, a differentiation that reflects double standards. Nevertheless, it too uses clear references to the crucifixion to empower the Israeli hero through his suffering. Yet, I believe that even in victimhood there is something of a striving for change, since the protagonist sacrifices himself for the sake of ending the war. Rene Girard, in Violence and the Sacred, claims that sacrifice in different cultures is meant to soothe internal violence and prevent Shmulik Duvdevani, First Person Camera, (Jerusalem, 2010) [in Hebrew]. 15

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conflicts from erupting. 16 The scarified is usually a weak, socially isolated person, a child or a sick person, and if an animal is sacrificed, it usually bears human resemblance. Kings may be sacrificed as well, since paradoxically, they dwell outside of society. Today we no longer offer sacrifices and society finds other solutions for conflicts (ibid.). Leftist fictional films offer the hegemonic Zionist Jew, and here even a character named after an Israeli king, as a sacrifice for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This offering continues as recurring ritual, cleansing the guilt in a sort of repetitive confession. 17 Forgiveness is Oedipal in the sense that David returns to the land of his ancestors determined to save society’s morality. Yet he himself blindly takes part in the same crime and when he eventually discovers his identity as a criminal, he harms his body to pay for his deeds and heal a sick society. This tragic model places David on a pedestal while he also represents the nation’s sins. He is a moral hero unable to escape his destiny, sacrificing himself in order to bring absolution and salvation to society as a whole. In her book The Universal Jew, Mikhal Dekel analyses Zionist literature from the Tehiya period (Jewish national and cultural revival, from the late 19th century to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948). She shows how using the Greek tragedy as a literary model helped establish an individualistic national subject. Dekel claims that the shift from a group of helpless victims to selfsacrificing individuals reflects the transition from Jewish religion to Zionist nationalism, from communality to individualism. The tragedy’s structure focusing on the suffering of an individual, expressed Jewish suffering as a persecuted minority, as well as the individual’s ability to withstand anti-Semitic pogroms. While the community is seen as a herd of helpless sheep led to slaughter, the individual is more heroic; he is a witness spreading the news of these disasters and at times considers retaliation. He does not leave René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris, [1972] 1974). On cinematic confessions in personal documentaries, see Shmulik Duvdevani, First Person Camera. 16 17

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revenge to God. 18 While Jewish literature up to the 1880s draw mostly from Jewish heritage, the fact that Tehiya literature was modeled after the tragedy, shifted the secular-religious conflict and allowed for a narrative simultaneously modern and pre-modern. This narrative does contain something of the divine, yet it is detached from traditional diasporic Judaism. Thus, Jewish national culture is able to form a connection with Christian culture, built on Greek culture. 19 In contemporary Israeli cinema, more than a hundred years after the beginning of the Tehiya, a similar but reversed process occurs. On one hand, cinema, like the whole of Israeli culture, is returning to Jewish heritage, but it also openly integrates Christian elements into the national narrative. These values glorify an individualistic hero, separate from the crowd, but the goal is not to fortify his national strengths like in literature, but rather question the morality of the powerful Israeli military. They call the individual to ‘return’ to more humane, diasporic-Jewish values. While Hebrew literature after the late 19th century expressed a desire to save Jews from death in Europe, contemporary films accept the danger of death in Israel and even express a death wish. One of the strongest influences on the movement towards traditional diasporic values as an alternative to Israeli militant hegemony may be understood through Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s groundbreaking essay “Exile within Sovereignty”. 20 In the aforementioned paper by Meir Schnitzer, he claims that the unusual abundance of death in contemporary Israeli cinema stems from feelings of despair and ruin. 21 I agree with this theory, yet self-sacrifice in films by leftist directors conveys an additional, unique complexity: it expresses agony and guilt over the occupation of the Palestinians post 1967, feelings intensified in the 1980s Michal Dekel, The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment, (Evanston, 2010). 19 Michal Dekel, The Universal Jew, 137. 20 Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Exile within Sovereignty – Part I’, Theory and Criticism, 4 (1993), pp. 23–55; Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Exile within Sovereignty – Part II’, Theory and Criticism, 5 (1994), pp. 113–132. 21 Meir Schnitzer, ‘Death Becomes Us’. 18

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following the Lebanon war and the intifada. These films process the pain through death rituals cleansing the blame and turning it into forgiveness and even salvation. In some ways, these films turn the negative meaning into something positive, pure and beautiful. The unusual aesthetics of the death ritual in Forgiveness and other Israeli films, especially the lighting (white light flooding the selftorture and death scenes) has connotations of cleanliness, an aura of sainthood, of revival and resurrection. These self-sacrifice rituals nullify the guilt and express a wish for a clean slate, rising above the sins and atonement. 22 As opposed to films from the 1980s where the leftist protagonist suffers at the hands of Jewish and Arab extremists, in contemporary cinema he recognizes that he himself hurt Palestinians and victimized them. Thus, he hurts himself to pay for his sins. This self-crucifixion stems from unbearable ideological conflict and power struggle and not from a whole-hearted faith like in the biblical story of the binding and in early national cinema. Self-sacrifice turns him into an icon, a national hero. While early pioneering farmers and soldiers were sacrificed for the sake of the homeland, the contemporary hero is sacrificed for peace, the new, more moral Zionism. One may add that drawing from the Passion and crucifixion mean not only political and moral objection to Israeli government, but also a religious objection, since Israeli settlement (despite the conflict with Jewish tradition) and specifically contemporary settlement of Judea and Samaria, is done in the name of Judaism. In her paper “Secular Discomfort: Dialogue with the New Testament in Israeli Literature”, Ruth Kartun-Blum examines the way Hebrew literature relates to the New Testament. The New Testament in Israeli culture is ‘alien’ or even taboo. Nevertheless, writers in different times gravitated towards it and were inspired by it. In the literature of early statehood, reliance on the New Testament expressed the aspirations of the individual turning his or See Shmulik Duvdevani’s harsh essay about ‘Waltz with Bashir’: Shmulik Duvdevani, ‘‘As Long as you are Drawing and not Filming, It’s OK’: Ethics and Accountability in ‘Waltz with Bashir’’, Mikan, Ethics and Responsibility in Israeli Cinema, 13 (2013), pp. 50–67 [in Hebrew]. 22

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her back on hegemonic authority. Authors and poets used themes from the New Testament to return to religious sentiment while passing over the complex connection to the Hebrew Bible. They accessed the text directly, as a ‘virgin-like’ text that was even translated to biblical Hebrew and therefore could serve as an alternative to Jewish Holy Scriptures. The New Testament describes the biography of a single person going against hegemony; the loneliness, torments and betrayals of his life in Jerusalem. Authors living in Jerusalem told their own local life-story through a dialogue with the New Testament. Hebrew literature connected to universal themes through identifying with the suffering and death of Jesus. While the Hebrew Bible is a national text, where God is an awe inspiring, grave, formless entity, Jesus can be a source of identification and forgiveness, and his image expressed a longing for a father figure and for a more spiritual life. 23 In comparison to the literature Kartun-Blum examines, crucifixion motifs occur more often in films about national issues, not as a way to express universal human themes. In my opinion, instances of crucifixion and self-sacrifice in cinema in recent decades express the difficulty of the Israeli Zionist center to accept the position of sovereign power bound with restricting Palestinian freedom. Despite the fact that the New Testament is not always explicitly mentioned in Israeli cinema, the suffering of protagonists as a narrative similar to it, since it stems from conflicts of religious and national rule of the holy land, just like in Jesus’s time, and it tells of the ‘via dolorosa’ to peace and salvation. The New Testament and specifically the image of Jesus as it was preserved in culture, glorifies narratives of victimhood and its power. As Kartun-Blum wrote: The attacked is beautiful, powerful. Thus, Christianity grants the world, especially through the crucifixion and The Book of Revelation, the masochistic ideal or pleasure – and maybe even

Ruth Kartun-Blum, ‘Secular Discomfort: Dialogue with the New Testament in Israeli Literature’, Dimuy, 27 (2006), pp. 7–32 [in Hebrew]. 23

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In Israeli cinema, the powerful one is the attacked and the beautiful. Israeli and Palestinian nationalism struggle for the right to be the victim, and crucifying the protagonist grants that right to each side and therefore portraits it as more moral. Moreover, Christian values enter Israeli cinema by the very use of the cinematic medium, which, due to the dominance of Western cinema, is filled with Christian themes, aesthetics and narrative structures. While the Jewish amorphous God prohibits ‘any graven image’, cinema, with its often materialistic, physical and individualistic nature, is closer to Christian themes. Israeli films about the conflict criticize the government and self-criticize the political left. Yet this ‘self-flagellation’ has become a recurring ritual of Zionist hegemony (constantly expressing feelings of inferiority and apologetic towards less dominant groups) and perhaps this ritual preserves its power through apologizing for power itself. These films express authentic guilt and pain, but still preserve the hegemony of the Zionist man. He stands center stage, at the heart of society and serves as its moral compass. His morality strengthens by the conflict he feels in the face of his own sovereignty. He is aware of the blame and takes responsibility for it, but at the same time rids himself of it through rituals of torture and self-sacrifice. He offers himself as a substitute for the victims of future wars, but since this offer cannot be realized, it takes the form of a beautiful, repeating death ritual in cinema.

SELF-SACRIFICE IN PALESTINIAN CINEMA: SONS OF ABRAHAM AND JESUS OF PALESTINE

A Hebrew story by Palestinian-Israeli Taufik Da’adli tells of a beautiful hill on the outskirts of a city. A shepherd and his son entertain guests for a meal, but when the father slaughters a lamb, he injures the son’s hand and the guests joke that he was trying to slaughter the son. The rumor spreads and later the green pastures on the hill start to dwindle. An old wise woman suggests offering 24

Ruth Kartun-Blum, ‘Secular Discomfort’, pp. 22.

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sacrifices to quench the land’s thirst, and it indeed flourishes once more: A young man, tall and pleasant […] did not understand the purpose of the multiple sacrifices […] He also said, as rash young men often do, that he is willing to sacrifice his head to release the lambs. One of his friends, who adored him, especially for his compassion and concern for all living things, treated his words seriously, too seriously one may say. Thus, a rumor spread that a wise and pleasant young man is willing to sacrifice himself instead of a few lambs and let the earth drink the best of drinks. One morning the young man found himself hanged on two planks of wood with a thorn crown on his head. […] Unfortunately, since the pleasant young man sacrificed himself, and maybe even before – the legend came to us incomplete – the earth grew more and more thirsty and demanded more of that excellent drink. Thus […] the people of the city and its surroundings find themselves on the alter as a burned offering. 25

The hill, also called ‘mountain’, represents Moriah, Mount of Olives and Al Aqsa mosque on Temple Mount, where the binding of Isaac, the crucifixion and Mohammad’s ascension occurred, and the city represents Jerusalem and the holy land. The story tells the history of sacrificial offering: slaughtering an animal for food, a son’s sacrifice by his father that never took place, ritual animal sacrifice and eventually crucifixion. The sacrifice sanctifies the place, and the place demands more sacrifices. What started as a fictitious tale turns into a creed. In this contemporary tale of crucifixion, Judas’s betrayal is interpreted as an expression of loyalty. The friend offered the young man out of blind faith in his words and the power of the masses spreading the rumor is, apparently, what crucified him. The crucifixion, like the binding, may have never happened and is Taufik Da’adli, ‘A City in the Shadow of a Mountain’, Ha’aretz Culture & Literature, December 19, 2014, p. 1 [In Hebrew]. 25

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perhaps part of the incomplete legend. 26 In the Qurʾan, the binding begins with Abraham dreaming about sacrificing his son as God commanded him. Following the dream, his son pleads with Abraham to fulfill the commandment. When father and son go up the mountain, Abraham sees a sheep and sacrifices it. Here too, as in the Jewish story, Abraham’s son is saved. In Da’adli’s story, as in the Qurʾan, the dream, the rumor or the legend are realized and become an extreme reality. The Qurʾan does not explicitly say who that son was: was it Isaac, the son of the legal wife Sarah, the father of Israel, or Ishmael, the son of Hagar, Sarah’s maidservant, the father of the Arab nation? The question, who was meant to be sacrificed, determines who is the chosen son. The question which of Abraham’s sons was chosen to inherent the land, stands at the heart of The Olive Harvest by Hanna Elias (2013). In the film, Raeda wished to marry Taher, but her father destines her to marry Taher’s older brother, Mazen. The younger brother is a politician working in Ramallah, while the older one is a farmer, a poet and a political activist who was imprisoned. The bride’s father calls both of them ‘sons of Abraham’. The brothers’ struggle represents the conflict between two tendencies in the Palestinian national struggle, political and otherwise: owning lands, poetry and active resistance to Israeli rule. Moreover, the fight of the two sons of Abraham for the bride’s love represents the two nations’ (Israeli and Palestinian) conflict over the right to the homeland. In both senses, the bride symbolizes the land. In order to win her hand, each of the brothers try to show the father how much he sacrificed for the homeland. Eventually, the woman is the one being sacrificed, when on her wedding day she runs in her white dress to the olive grove, sinks in the mud and dies. Raeda’s death plants her in the ground and she becomes one of the The use of first person plural, as opposed the more common first person singular, expresses the collective consciousness of a folktale. On national collective consciousness in Palestinian cinematic autobiographies, see Yael Ben-Zvi, ‘I, First Person Plural: National Autobiography in Palestinian Documentary Film’, South Cinema Notebook 2, on Destruction, Trauma & Cinema (2007), pp. 71–79 [in Hebrew]. 26

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olive trees, like other women in the family. The trees-women connect the people to their land. In Palestinian culture, as in many other cultures, the image of the homeland as a woman is common. 27 This passive imagery of women and land has become a form of feminine national activism for female film characters, actors and directors. 28 The imagery of Palestine as a bride charges the death of the shahid (martyr) with gender implications. The shahid’s blood quenches the thirst of the earth and his death is like a marriage with the homeland. This image appears in many works, including the Syrian novella Palestinian Wedding by Adib Nihawi 29 (1970) and the Palestinian documentary When You Were Carried (Iyas Nattur, 2001). The equation where a woman symbolizes the land and a man’s sacrifice is a wedding with the homeland creates a meaning of impotency when a man does not fight. The classic film by Michel Khleifi, Wedding in Galilee (1987), tells of Adel’s wedding, the son of the mukhtar (head of the village), under Israeli military rule. The military’s presence and the father’s surrender to Israeli demands enrage the groom and cause him impotency while guests are waiting to see a blood stained sheet. The tension leads Adel to confront his father, and his friends attempt to murder the military governor. After the bride pierces her own hymen, they display the bloodstained sheet and the Israeli army is expelled from the village. When the groom fails to have intercourse, he is angry at his father for agreeing to let the army in the village and at the wedding. However, Samia, the bride tries to calm him and says, ‘forgive him, See Mira Tzoreff, ‘Palestinian Woman as the Others’ Other— Women, Gender, and Nationalism in Palestinian Society in the Shadow of the Intifadas’, in Women in the Middle East between Tradition and Change, Ed. Ofra Bengio, pp. 109–138 (Tel Aviv, 2004) [in Hebrew]; Nira YuvalDavis, Gender and Nation, (London, New Delhi, 1997). 28 See Yael Ben-Zvi Morad, ‘Borders in Motion: The Evolution of the Portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Contemporary Israeli Cinema’, pp. 276–293; Yael Ben-Zvi Morad, Patricide: Gender and Nationalism in Palestinian Cinema, (Tel Aviv, 2011) [in Hebrew]. 29 Adib Nihawi, ‘Urs Falestinee (A Palestinian Wedding)’, Al-Aadab, June (1970), pp. 2–6, pp. 66–77 [in Arabic]. 27

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he does not know what he’s doing.’ This expression paraphrases the words of Jesus when he is taken to be crucified with two criminals: And when they were come to the place, which is called Calvary, there they crucified him, and the malefactors, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. 30

The bride suggests forgiveness as a solution to the family and national conflict, and therefore offers her groom as a sacrifice. However, the groom refuses to be ‘crucified’ and answers, ‘The father of us all, the mukhtar of us all, does not know what he’s doing?’ While Jesus pleads for the Father-Lord to forgive the criminals, Adel returns the blame to his biological father and the symbolic father (mukhtar). The wish to murder his father merges with a more symbolic patricide: that of the Israeli governor. Several critics saw the bride’s act of piercing her own hymen as a feminist act, 31 but in my opinion displaying the sheet and expelling the army following the plot to murder both fathers (the mukhtar and the governor) implies that national success hinges on a male oedipal struggle. As opposed to Freudian theory, here we have an actual, physical power struggle, and not an internal, emotional conflict. 32 However, the film exposes Palestinian masculinity as a matter of performance, since the sexual act itself was missing. Luke, 23:33–34. See Ella Shohat, ‘Wedding in Galilee’, Middle East Report, 154 (1988), pp. 44–46; Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, (Cairo, 2000); Nurith Gertz, George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory, (Indianapolis, 2008); Anna Ball, ‘Between a Postcolonial Nation and Fantasies of the Feminine: The Contested Visions of Palestinian Cinema’, Camera Obscura, 69, 23, 3 (2008) pp. 1–33. 32 See Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX (1923–1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, (London, [1924] 1961). 30 31

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However, the desire for patricide may have been eventually realized by the youngest son of the mukhtar. The boy, who earlier released a mare that ran into a minefield, may have also pulled a trigger. At the end of the film, the mukhtar disappears and his family look for him. Three shots are heard and the little boy returns running in the dark from the fields. The shooting might be part of the celebration, as is the custom in modern Arab weddings. The boy lays down on the ground and watches the new dawn rising. A sound of a bird flying is heard in the end. Throughout the film, weapons are linked to the Israeli army and images of nature represent Palestinian rural society. Therefore, concluding the film with a new dawn rising over the field, symbolizes Palestinian hope. Children, too, often symbolize hope for national independence in Palestinian cinema. Birds are another symbol for Palestinian national freedom: caged birds symbolize the current situation while free and flying birds represent hope for independence. 33 Nevertheless, the shooting and the mukhtar’s disappearance remain a mystery. In face of the national and oedipal struggles, the father may have been shot by the army as revenge, he may have committed suicide, or the son may have helped him to kill himself and so realize the young men’s wish for patricide. A clear example of a son fulfilling his fantasy of patricide, where the father himself aids in the act, may be seen in the film Thirst, by Tawfik Abu Wael (2004). The film, which is built in an oedipal model as well, ends in explicit patricide terminating the father’s problematic leadership. The desire for patricide is very common in Palestinian cinema and expresses a wish to end submissive Palestinian leadership and overcome Israeli rule, seen as a symbolic father. 34 Thus, the Father in Palestinian cinema is often sacrificed on the sons’ altar of national awakening. In Palestinian cinema, preparations for ‘national action’ is a coming of age ceremony for young Palestinian men. This masculine initiation process in the film Paradise Now (Hany AbuGertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema; Ben-Zvi Morad, Patricide. See Yael Ben-Zvi Morad, Patricide, where I examined the Palestinian national struggle as a struggle for manhood and a coming of age ceremony for young Palestinian men. 33 34

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Assad, 2005) follows the Via Dolorosa. It tells the story of two young men from Nablus, Said and Khaled, sent to commit a suicide bombing. The preparations for the mission are an initiation ceremony, taking them from the world of women and children to the world of men, as well as a religious purification ceremony preparing them for self-sacrifice. The national self-sacrifice is likened to marriage and religion in different ways and thus carries gender and religious meaning within the national narrative. While Khaled carries his martyr speech, the other men eat sandwiches prepared by Khaled’s mother. The bread passing between them, symbolizes the flesh of the sacrificed young men. The film crosscuts from Muslim sermons and blessings to a purification ceremony that raises connotations of Christian baptism. In this way, birth, death and marriage are joined in Muslim-Christian ceremonies. Other men bathe them, cut their hair and shave their faces, and dress them in white garments, a color symbolizing both festivity and death in Arab culture and in the movie itself. This purification ceremony is done to brides and grooms in Arab culture and here is done to young men sent to be sacrificed in a mission compared to being wed with the land. Before they leave, they dine with the other men in a mise-en-scene similar to The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci. Finally, they wear suicide vests under elegant suits, on one hand distinguishing them as grooms and on the other hand creating the image of heroes of an American action film, thus giving the film a complex reflexive meaning, expressed in other ways as well. After many deliberations and a long journey, only one of them, Said, completes the mission, and his choice marks him as chosen, more moral and mature them his friend, who returns to Nablus crying. Said boards a bus full of passengers, mostly soldiers, in Tel Aviv, and the ending shot shows his face shining in a white light, symbolizing both the explosion and the paradise promised to Muslim martyrs. The number of murdered Israelis, thirteen, is that of Jesus’s thirteen apostles. Basing the character of the shahid on Jesus, presents him as a moral sacrifice for national redemption and covers the murderous face of terrorism. However, the film does raise awareness to cultural and cinematic constructs, exposing its own religious and cultural constructs and conceptions of justice and morality, and not as absolute truths. As Hamid Naficy claimed about diasporic cinema (Palestinian cinema included), deconstruction of cultural constructs and perceptions stops at

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‘homeland’, which remains a clear signifier of an absolute referent. 35 Following Naficy, one may say that the film’s deconstructive nature does expose the character of Said as a cultural (religious and cinematic) construct, yet it leaves the sense of justice and identification with him and with the Palestinian national struggle. Palestinian cinema often incorporates themes from the New Testament. The Passion and crucifixion are even referred to in films about children. For example, in The Tale of the Three Lost Jewels by Michel Khleifi (1995), and Mai Masri’s documentary Children of Shatila (1998). The film Cyber Palestine by Elia Suleiman (1999) is a modern adaptation of the story of Jesus born in Gaza. In the beginning of the movie, Joseph receives a text message from Gabriel telling him to bring the pregnant Meriam to Bethlehem before midnight, where she will give birth. However, the couple’s journey stops at Erez Crossing, where Joseph quarrels with a soldier and is killed. After their son is born, Meriam re-embarks on the journey. Joseph and Meriam’s journey, and Meriam’s second journey with her son, are full of religious symbols, but not only Christian ones. The character of Gabriel references Islam as well, since Gabriel accompanied Mohammed’s night journey. Joseph’s death is thus compared to Muhammad’s ascension from Al-Aqsa mosque. And Joseph’s picture as shahid standing in front of Al-Aqsa mosque that Meriam packs when they leave for the first journey, portrays him as a Muslim, Christian and national martyr. During the journey from Gaza to Bethlehem in the West Bank, the couple need to cross Jerusalem, in Israel. Jerusalem is not explicitly mentioned in the film, but it is present since their journey necessarily passes through it and there are visual references to it, for example a building in Gaza resembling Al-Aqsa. Thus, all the parts of Palestine appear in the film: Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, even though only Gaza is actually shown. Through imagining the Palestinian homeland united, the blockade on Gaza Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, (Princeton, New Jersey and Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 2001). 35

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is breached and the political division of Palestinian territory disappears. The film unites not only space, but also time, it links contemporary Gaza to local history and presents Jesus as Palestinian. In Joseph’s and Meriam’s home, we see two Roman style pillars, and so the architecture and the Christian narrative plant the Palestinian in their homeland and link them to the land’s historical continuum since the Roman era. Furthermore, the film references salvation to come, but also features many images of the sea, symbolizing the Palestinian liberated past, prior to 1948. Therefore, the film connects the limited space and lack of freedom in the present, to a liberated future of salvation, marked with the birth of a messiah. The religious messiah now brings national salvation. The film creates an ‘imagined community’, as Benedict Anderson put it, 36 since different parts of Palestine represent different sects in the Palestinian people living under different governments. The use of Christian and Muslim motifs combined, creates a multi-religious nationality joining the people together. Christian elements are prominent in all of Suleiman’s films. It is interesting to see the hinted manifestation of Jesus in Suleiman’s own character in Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) or in that of a woman ascending to the heavens from Jerusalem, returning to earth as ‘the hand of God’ and defeating Israeli security services in Divine Intervention (2003). These motifs and visuals influenced by Christian art are present in Michel Khleifi’s work and in Hany AbuAssad’s as well. Indeed, these well-known directors grew up in Nazareth and live in Europe; they testify to a fusion of cultures and religions. The Palestinians are a people created through dissipation, through losing their homeland to conquerors, 37 and paradoxically, Palestinian nationality holds annihilation to be a religious-national solution, a suffering leading to salvation. Self-sacrifice is even more Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London and New York, 1991). 37 Baruch Kimmerling, Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People, (New York, 1993). 36

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prominent in later films, such as Paradise Now, where the individualistic element is more evident and connected explicitly to the image of Jesus. Elia Suleiman’s films not only incorporate Christian and Muslim themes into Palestinian nationality, but also Jewish and even Zionist motifs, in adaptation or as a Palestinian national retort. For example, the use of Leonard Cohen’s song “First we take Manhattan” in Chronicles of a Disappearance dismantles the opposition of Jews and Palestinians, the occupying and the occupied. Even more so, is the scene where Adan, a Palestinian young woman, sings HaTikva (‘The Hope’, national anthem of Israel). She thus adopts the national emotion of persecuted Jews and their hope to become a free nation in their homeland, and incorporates it into Palestinian nationality, and vice versa, translating the persecution and hope for Palestinian national sovereignty over Israel and Jerusalem to the language of the occupying. This exceptional film stirs national (and gender) identities using diasporic cinematic language. 38

CONCLUSION

Both Israeli and Palestinian cinemas fuse (new and old, foreign and local) religious elements with contemporary national ideas. In these films, Jesus is localized. He becomes Israeli, Jewish or Palestinian. Eventually the East-West dichotomy breaks down. In his paper “Identification with Victimhood in Recent Cinema”, Roy Brand 39 analyzes the victimhood theme in Steven’s Spielberg’s Munich (2005), a pro-Zionist American film, and in Paradise Now. He sophistically claims that both nations benefit from victimhood since it justifies violence. Each side can attack the other For different perspectives on the film see Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking; Haim Bresheeth, ‘Telling the Stories of Heim and Heimat, Home and Exile: Recent Palestinian Films and the Iconic Parable of the Invisible Palestine’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 1/1 (2002), pp. 24–39; Gertz and Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema; Ben-Zvi Morad, Patricide. 39 Roy Brand, ‘Identification with Victimhood in Recent Cinema’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 49/2 (2008), pp. 165–181. 38

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and blame it not only for its sufferings but also for its moral degradation. I agree with Brand that each side gains something by adopting victimhood, blaming the other side is a way to clear one’s conscience after violent acts and justifies adhering to a passive ‘nochoice’ position. Each side benefits from this position in terms of internal public image and international image. Nevertheless, in my opinion, victimhood also grants an aura of sainthood and sanctity based on the Christian narrative. The image of Jesus has a central position in Western culture and in the global village, as an icon of moral supremacy, humanity and brave individualism. Basing the national narrative on the Christian one enables much more than a clean conscience, it allows salvation to arise from death and bloodshed. It covers the blame, but also expresses an honest wish that the bloodshed will stop with the sacrifice of one very precious person. However, this wish, projected on screen, is bound to end in disappointment. These films do express awareness to the futility of this wish and to the persistent ongoing bloodshed in the struggle for the homeland, much like the thirsty earth in Taufik Da’adli’s story. Palestinian cinema offers religious human sacrifice as a means to national salvation, and at the same time, they express ironic awareness of Palestinian inability and cinema’s inability to redeem the nation. They serve only as an instrument of creating an imaginary community and a national identity in a reality of geographical and political divide. Israeli films however, give human sacrifice as an offering to the ‘God of wars’, in hopes that the precious sacrifice will satisfy the land and the bloodshed will cease. These Israeli films, full of ‘self-flagellation’ and remorse, are in themselves religious ceremonies, they are the ‘ram caught in the thicket’, sacrificed by the political left in prayer for forgiveness and peace. Producing these films (a sort of public self-crucifixion) is the sacrifice artists give in the name of Israeli society.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London, New York, 1991).

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Anna Ball, ‘Between a Postcolonial Nation and Fantasies of the Feminine: The Contested Visions of Palestinian Cinema’ Camera Obscura, 69, 23, 3 (2008). Yael Ben-Zvi, ‘The Popular Model in Israeli Cinema of the 1990s: Sociological Factors’, Achshav, 69–70 (2005) [in Hebrew]. ———, ‘Center and Periphery in Israeli Cinema of the 1990s’, Alpayim, 30 (2006) [in Hebrew]. ———, ‘I, First Person Plural: National Autobiography in Palestinian Documentary Film’, South Cinema Notebook 2, on Destruction, Trauma & Cinema, (2007) [in Hebrew]. ———, ‘Borders in Motion: The Evolution of the Portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Contemporary Israeli Cinema’, in Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, Ed. Miri Talmon-Bohm, Yaron Peleg, (Austen, 2011). ———, Patricide: Gender and Nationalism in Palestinian Cinema, (Tel Aviv, 2011) [in Hebrew]. Roy Brand, ‘Identification with Victimhood in Recent Cinema’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 49/2 (2008). Haim Bresheeth, ‘Telling the Stories of Heim and Heimat, Home and Exile: Recent Palestinian Films and the Iconic Parable of the Invisible Palestine, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 1/1 (2002). Taufik Da’adli, ‘A City in the Shadow of a Mountain’, Ha’aretz Culture & Literature, December 19, 2014 [In Hebrew]. Michal Dekel, The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity, and the Zionist Moment, (Evanston, Illinois, 2010). Shmulik Duvdevani, First Person Camera, (Jerusalem, 2010) [in Hebrew]. ———, ‘‘As Long as you are Drawing and not Filming, It’s OK’: Ethics and Accountability in ‘Waltz with Bashir’’, Mikan, Ethics and Responsibility in Israeli Cinema, 13 (2013) [in Hebrew]. Ariel L. Feldestein, ‘Filming the Homeland: Cinema in Eretz Israel and the Zionist Movement, 1917–1939’, in Israeli Cinema: Identities in Motion, Ed. Miri Talmon, Yaron Peleg, (Austin, 2011).

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Yael S. Feldman, ‘Isaac or Oedipus? Jewish Tradition and the Israeli Akeda’, in Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies, Eds. Cheryl Exum, Stephen Moore (Sheffield, 1998). Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX (1923–1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, Ed. James Strachey, Anna Freud, (London, [1924] 1961). Nurith Gertz, Motion Fiction: Israeli Fiction in Film, (Tel-Aviv, 1993) [In Hebrew]. Nurith Gertz, George Khleifi, Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory, (Indianapolis, 2008). René Girard, La violence et le sacré, (Paris, [1972] 1974). Itay Harlap, ‘The Victimizer of a Good Will: Anxiety, Denial, and Guilt in the Television Serial ‘Parashat Ha-Shavu’a’’, Mikan, Ethics and Responsibility in Israeli Cinema, 13 (2013). Yehudith Kafri, “Bereshiyot” Glume of Summer, (Tel-Aviv, 1988) [in Hebrew]. Ruth Kartun-Blum, Profane Scripture: Reflection on the Dialogue with the Bible in Modern Hebrew Poetry, (Cincinnati, 1999). ———, ‘Secular Discomfort: Dialogue with the New Testament in Israeli Literature’, Dimuy, 27 (2006) [in Hebrew]. ———, The Sword of the Word: The Binding of Isaac in Israeli Poetry, (Tel-Aviv, 2013) [in Hebrew]. Baruch Kimmerling, Joel S. Migdal, Palestinians: The Making of a People, (New York, 1993). Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Sylvia Walsh, (Cambridge, 2006). Yael Munk, ‘Land, Man, Blood: On Forgiveness (Udi Aloni, 2006)’ South Cinema Notebook 2 On Destruction, Trauma & Cinema, (2007) [in Hebrew]. Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, (Princeton, New Jersey and Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 2001). Adib Nihawi, ‘Urs Falestinee (A Palestinian Wedding)’, Al-Aadab, June (1970) [in Arabic]. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, ‘Exile within Sovereignty – Part I’, Theory and Criticism, 4 (1993).

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———, ‘Exile within Sovereignty – Part II’, Theory and Criticism, 5 (1994). Meir Schnitzer, ‘Death Becomes Us’, Ha’aretz Gallery, December 19, 2014 [in Hebrew]. Viola Shafik, Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity, (Cairo, 2000). Ella Shohat, ‘Wedding in Galilee’, Middle East Report, 154 (1988). ———, Israeli Cinema: East / West and the Politics of Representation, (London, 2010). Hamutal Tsamir, ‘The Pioneers’ Sacrifice, The Holy Land, and the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in the 1920s’, A Moment of Birth: Studies in Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures in Honor of Dan Miron, Ed. Hannan Hever, (Jerusalem, winter 2007) [in Hebrew]. Moshe Tzimerman, Signs of Cinema: The History of the Israeli Film between 1896 and 1948, (Tel-Aviv, 2001) [in Hebrew]. ———, The Israeli Invisible Movies, (Tel-Aviv, 2007) [in Hebrew]. Mira Tzoreff, ‘Palestinian Woman as the Others’ Other—Women, Gender, and Nationalism in Palestinian Society in the Shadow of the Intifadas’, in Women in the Middle East between Tradition and Change, Ed. Ofra Bengio, (Tel Aviv, 2004) [in Hebrew]. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, (London, New Delhi, 1997).

9. RELIGION AND NATION BUILDING IN TURKEY: THE ROLE OF INSTITUTIONALIZED RELIGION IN THE CASE OF DIYANET GÜL ŞEN 1 INTRODUCTION

It is quite out of the ordinary to consider religion and nationalism within the same context when it comes to Middle Eastern countries. In the Turkish context, however, these two terms are bound together in a very distinct relationship that forms an integral part of the framework of the ideology of the state. The sheer fact that the ideological basis of the Turkish state contains a most complex attitude to religion, regardless of which political party rules, is overlooked all too often. Instead of a proper assessment of relative shifts in this relationship, complicated processes within the same context are either denoted ‘Islamization’ or ‘de-Islamization’, dependent upon the perceived emphasis placed on religion. To perceive developments in terms of these binary opposites is neither appropriate nor helpful in understanding what is rightfully called ‘one of the most complex socio-political phenomena in contemporary Turkey’. 2 Contrary to Dr. Gül Şen is a Lecturer at the Department of Islamic Studies and Middle Eastern Languages at the University of Bonn. 2 For an analysis of these relations see Metin Karabaşoğlu, ‘İslâm ve Milliyetçilik Arasındaki İlişki ve Etkileşim’ [Relation and Interrelation between Islam and Nationalism], in Dönemler ve Zihniyetler [Epochs and 1

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superficial perceptions, the final result of the closely knit entanglement of state, nationalism and religion – in this case, Islam – is not Islamization, but, rather, a reinforced collective identity, as well as a strenghtened loyality towards the state. It is vital to understand that the Kemalist conception of the state is the common ground of all political actors. This article describes and analyzes the particular concepts of religion and nationalism in Turkey, which have formed the basis of the process of nation building ever since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. I will discuss the interrelationship between the nation building process 3 and the official politics on religion. In the Turkish context, ‘religion’ has to be understood within the ideological framework of Kemalist nationalism and secularism, which are the two fundamental principles of statehood in present-day Turkey. I will examine the institutionalization of religion for the purposes of, and its role in, the nation building process, by taking a closer look at Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, henceforth Diyanet (the literal translation of which is ‘Presidency of Religious Affairs’), a government institution subject to the immediate authority of the prime minister.

THE PROCESS OF TURKISH NATION BUILDING

According to the ideas of its founder, Mustafa Kemal, 4 and by means of the new official doctrine of ‘Kemalism’ (Kemalizm), 5 the Mentalities], eds. Tanıl Bora and Murat Gültekingil, (İstanbul, 2009), pp. 690–702, quote from p. 690. 3 For the term nation building, I refer to the definition given by Jochen Hippler, ‘Violent Conflicts, Conflict Prevention and NationBuilding: Terminology and Political Concepts’, in Nation-Building: A Key Concept for Peaceful Conflict Transformation?, Ed. Jochen Hippler, (London and Ann Arbor, 2005), pp. 3–14. 4 He was later given the name ‘Atatürk’ (Father of Turks), exclusively reserved for him. For a biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, based on coeval accounts, see Halil Gülbeyaz, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: Vom Staatsgründer zum Mythos, 2nd ed., (Berlin, 2004). 5 For an analysis of Kemalism and its various reflections, as well as its effects on the history of the Republic, the following collection offers

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Turkish Republic, founded on October 29, 1923, was conceived as a modern Western country ‘on the level of contemporary civilization’. 6 Since that time, this doctrine has been firmly anchored in the political system as the official ideology. These concomitant reforms were intended to give the Republic a secular orientation in contrast to its predecessor, the Ottoman Empire. The question of whether these reforms did, indeed, constitute a break with the Ottoman political heritage, or whether they were a continuation of previous attempts at reform, is still a matter of debate. On the whole, the Kemalist reforms should be seen as a continuation of the earlier reforms that had been undertaken by the Ottoman state during the previous two centuries with a view to modernization. 7 Departing from previous ideas, however, Kemalism contains six ideological principles, later referred to as the ‘Principles of Atatürk’ (Atatürk İlkeleri), which were formative and continue as the basis of the political order of the Republic: nationalism (milliyetçilik), laicism (laiklik), and revolutionism (devrimcilik), 8 as well as republicanism (cumhuriyetçilik), an initial but comprehensive investigation: Kemalizm [Kemalism], Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce [Political Ideas in Modern Turkey], Vol. 2, ed. Ahmet İnsel, (Istanbul, 2002). 6 Atatürk’s aim ‘to attain the level of contemporary civilization’ (çağdaş medeniyet düzeyine ulaşma) is also included in the Preamble of the Constitution of 1982. Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, accessed December 4, 2014. http://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/constitution_en.pdf. 7 Mehmet Ö. Alkan, for example, thinks that the Republic had canalized this modernization process in a revolutionary and dynamic way. Mehmet Ö Alkan, ‘Giriş’ [Introduction], in Cumhuriyet’e Devreden Düşünce Mirası. Tanzimat ve Meşrutiyet’in Birikimi [The Intellectual Heritage Transferred to the Republic. The Thinking of Tanzimat and the Constitutional Period], Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düşünce [Political Ideas in Modern Turkey], Ed. Mehmet Ö Alkan, Vol. I, 5th ed., (Istanbul, 2003), p. 21. 8 Rumpf translates this principle using the term “revolutionary reformism”, meaning some sort of a compromise between reformism and revolutionism, since the Kemalist reform movement was not a revolution,

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‘programmatic well-being of the people’ 9 (halkçılık), and statism (devletçilik). In the creation of the new Republic, the two principles of nationalism and laicism played a pivotal role. Today, they are the unassailable bases of both the political and the social system. They are indispensable elements of the self-conception of Turkey. 10 The rule of Mustafa Kemal saw not only the implementation of farreaching political and social reforms, but also far-reaching changes in the legal and educational systems, and in the cultural sector. 11 Next to the fundamental reforms that were necessary for the emergence of a civil society, which included the adoption of a secular legal system following the example of Swiss civil law, Italian penal law, 12 and German commercial law and code of procedure, a but still too radical to be called just a reform. See Christian Rumpf, Das türkische Verfassungssystem, (Wiesbaden, 1996), p. 113. 9 The term halkçılık is often incorrectly translated as “populism”. See Bekim Agai, ‘Islam und Kemalismus in der Türkei’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, (2004), pp. 33–34, p. 18 (Footnote 4). 10 For the understanding of nationalism in Turkey see Mehmet Mihri Özdogan, Nation und Symbol. Der Prozess der Nationalisierung am Beispiel der Türkei, (Frankfurt am Main, et al, 2007). The Ottoman roots are discussed in detail by Yusuf Sarınay, ‘The Emergence of Turkish Nationalism under the Ottoman Empire’, in The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilisation III, Philosophy, Science and Institution, Ed. Kemal Çiçek, (Ankara, 2000), pp. 196– 206. 11 For the effects of the reforms in the educational sector during the early years of the Republic see Bekim Agai, Zwischen Netzwerk und Diskurs. Das Bildungsnetzwerk um Fethullah Gülen (geb. 1938): Die flexible Umsetzung des modernen islamischen Gedankenguts, (Schenefeld, 2004), pp. 60–64. The language reform had severe consequences both for religious scholars as well as for the Kurdish population. For more details see Geoffrey Haig, ‘The Invisibilisation of Kurdish: The Other Side of Language Planning in Turkey’, in Die Kurden. Studien zu ihrer Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Eds. Stephan Conermann, Geoffrey Haig, (Schenefeld, 2004), pp. 121–150. 12 Italian penal law was the valid penal law passed after Mussolini’s seizure of power, and, thus, strongly influenced by the ideology of fascism.

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strictly regimented process of nation building took place in line with Kemalist reforms. 13 From that point on, there was supposed to be only one nation, one country and a single sovereignty for all Turkish citizens, even though the population was multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Hence, the term nation building denotes the process of a corporative social integration. It encompasses the ‘development of a marked awareness of ethnic and cultural affiliation and a group orientation based on a common language and cultural tradition, namely […] in connection with a tendency to exert political compulsion in order to secure internal and external unity’. 14 Turkish nation building is marked by two dimensions, as pointed out by Jochen Hippler in his description of this process: a political objective, and a strategy for reaching specific political objectives. Among those core elements of the ‘integration of society’ and a ‘unifying, persuasive ideology’, as Kemalism has been defined by Hippler, particular attention was attached to ‘social integration’ in addition to the formation of the Turkish nation and the development of a ‘functional state apparatus’. 15 The end result of this process has been, on the one hand, a political system with a comprehensive legal basis and a centralized administration. On the other, the construction of a collective identity that contains, as fundamental elements, Turkishness (Türkçülük), Nation, Military and the Kemalist concept of statehood by which a commonly For nation building in the early Republic see Sibel Bozdogan, Modernism and Nation-Building: Turkish Architectural Culture in the Early Republic, (Washington, 2001). On population transfer, see Fikret Adanir, ‘Bevölkerungsverschiebungen, Siedlungspolitik und ethnisch-kulturelle Homogenisierung: Nationsbildung auf dem Balkan und in Kleinasien, 1878–1923’, in Ausweisung - Abschiebung - Vertreibung in Europa. 16.–20. Jahrhundert, Eds. Sylvia Hahn et al., (Innsbruck et al, 2006), pp. 172–192. 14 Johannes Weiß, ‘Nation-building’, ‘Nation-building’, in Politikwissenschaft. Theorien-Methoden-Begriffe, Eds. Dieter Nohlen, RainerOlaf Schultze, Pipers Wörterbuch zur Politik, Vol. 1, (München, 1985), p. 589. 15 See J. Hippler, ‘Violent Conflicts’, pp. 3–14. 13

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understood past, present and future was envisaged and is laid down in the preamble of the Turkish constitution of 1982: […] That all Turkish citizens are united in national honor and pride, in national joy and grief, in their rights and duties regarding national existence, in blessings and in burdens and in every manifestation of national life […]. 16

The sovereignty of the modern Turkish state depends on a legitimacy embodied in the constitution. Since its inception, the elements of legitimacy enshrined in the constitution of the Republic of Turkey have been the nation, the indivisibility of the territory, and laicism. The irrevocability of the principles of the constitution – the Kemalist principles among others – as laid down in Article 4 of the Constitution of 1982, constitutes a further pillar of the legitimacy of the Turkish state. Apart from the Republic as the form of government, as stated in Article 1, the characteristics of the Republic, according to Article 2, are: a democratic, secular and social state governed by the rule of law within the notions of public peace, national solidarity and justice, respecting human rights, and loyalty to the nationalism of Atatürk. 17 The characteristics named in this article also reiterate and, hence, confirm the preamble. 18 Below, two of those irrevocable principles, nationalism and laicism, will be examined more closely. For the official English translation, refer to Constitution of The Republic of Turkey, accessed December 4, 2014. http://global.tbmm.gov.tr/ docs/constitution_en.pdf. 17 According to Article 174 of the Constitution the ‘revolutionary laws’ are also protected: no constitutional provision shall be construed or interpreted in a way that the revolutionary laws, ‘which aim to raise Turkish society above the level of contemporary civilization and to safeguard the secular character of the Republic’ would be unconstitutional. This refers to those laws that were passed immediately after the foundation of the Republic, such as the Unification of the Educational System (1924), the Wearing of Hats (1925), the Closure of Dervish Monasteries and Tombs, the Abolition of the Office (1925) and the Prohibition of the Wearing of Certain Garment (1934). 18 Preamble of the Constitution, 1f. 16

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The principle of nationalism is based on Article 2 of the Constitution of 1982, as quoted above. 19 The origins of Turkish nationalism go back to its founding father, Ziya Gökalp. His book, Türkçülüğün Esasları (The Principles of Turkishness), published in 1923, is regarded as the manifesto of Turkish nationalism based on a systematic and sociological approach. The most important element of Kemalist nationalism – the principle of the unitary state – is itself enshrined in Article 3 of the Constitution of 1982: ‘The State of Turkey, with its territory and nation, is an indivisible entity. Its language is Turkish’. 20 Therefore, the constitution does not recognize any regional, linguistic or religious distinctions. According to the Turkish Constitution, there is only a single nation, a single territory and a pooled sovereignty, even though the Turkish population has a multi-ethnic and multi-religious character. 21 Hence, the three components: territory, nation, and sovereignty, are inseparable and perceived to be congruent. The principle of laicism does not only designate a separation of state and religion, it also implies a strict control and steering of religion by the state. 22 One could speak of a particular ‘Turkish laicism’ that has no equivalent in any other state. Combined with the principle of nationalism, this leads to a unique policy on religion. As the most fundamental character of the Republic of Turkey, laicism stands for the separation of state and religion. As stated in the Preamble of the Constitution of 1982, ‘sacred religious Even to propose a modification of these regulations is illegal. All liberties are granted as long as they do not infringe upon the ‘democratic order of society’ and the ‘laical republic’. 20 Original: “Türkiye Devleti, ülkesi ve milletiyle bölünmez bir bütündür.” See Kemal Gözler, Türk Anayasa Hukuku [Turkish Constitutional Law], (Bursa, 2000), pp. 115–119. The term ‘unitary state’ (Turkish: üniter devlet) or ‘unitary’ is a special designation for the political system of Turkey. In no other state is the political system influenced by the principle of unitarism. 21 K. Gözler, Türk Anayasa Hukuku, pp. 115–119. 22 On the terms ‘laicism’ and ‘secularism’ see Yılmaz Bulut, Laizismus oder übergreifende Säkularität des Rechtsstaates? Der Diskurs um den Laizismus in der Türkei, (Berlin et al., 2008), pp. 15–24. 19

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feelings shall absolutely not be involved in state affairs and politics as required by the principle of secularism’. 23 This tenet has resulted in a laicist policy on religion that is a particular feature of Turkish laicism. It has remained a topic and a topos of debate in the political arena since the foundation of the Republic. By its very nature an assertive secularism, Turkish laicism decrees ‘the state favors a secular worldview in the public sphere and aims to confine religion to the private sphere’; by comparison a passive secularism ‘implies state neutrality toward various religions and allows the public visibility of religion’. 24 As an unalterable constitutional principle, Turkish laicism is a concept that has found wide acceptance in Turkish society. 25

THE IRRESISTIBLE ATTRACTION OF THE TURKISHISLAMIC SYNTHESIS

The origin of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (hereafter TIS), both as a collective term and a corrective pole to left leaning and Islamist tendencies, lies with the milieu of the intellectual society, Aydınlar Ocağı (Hearth of the Enlightened), during the 1960s and 1970s. 26 Despite the fact that the term itself was put into circulation in 1972 by the historian İbrahim Kafesoglu, and elaborated by the society in 1973 in the publication Aydınlar Ocağı’nın Görüşü (The Idea of the Hearth of the Enlightened), the ideological manifesto of the concept of TIS is commonly regarded to be the eponymous book, Türk-İslam-Sentezi (Turkish-Islamic Synthesis), posthumously published in 1985 by Kafesoğlu, himself a co-founder of Aydınlar Preamble of the Constitution, 1. Ahmet T. Kuru, ‘Reinterpretation of Secularim in Turkey. The Case of the Justice and Development Party’, in The Emergence of a New Turkey. Democracy and the AK Party, Ed. M. Hakan Yavuz, (Salt Lake City, 2006), p. 137. This form of laicism is represented by the AKP, i.e. the ruling party. 25 See Yümni Sezen, Türk Toplumunun Laiklik Anlayışı [The Understanding of Laicism in the Turkish Society], (Istanbul, 1993). 26 On its emergence and history see Dagmar Zeller-Mohrlok, Die Türkisch-Islamische Synthese. Eine Strategie zur Kanalisierung innen-politischer und wirtschaftlicher Konflikte der Türkei in den 80er Jahren, (Bonn, 1998). 23 24

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Ocağı. In the historical outline of his synthesis, Kafesoğlu claims that the pre-Islamic religion of the Turks had already included elements of Islamic belief. 27 Based on Kafesoğlu’s thesis, the Turkish nation was conceived as both the chosen and most powerful nation of the Islamic world, as well as a militarily, scientifically and theologically superior one. 28 However, TIS did not simply remain an ideological construct, but exerted wide-reaching influence on parties and politics during the 1970s and 1980s, in particular, on the military government after the military takeover of September 12, 1980. Within TIS, Islam was not seen by any of the members of Aydınlar Ocağı as a determinant factor for the ideological construct. Without affiliation to any party themselves, their goal was to overcome the split among the rightist parties. Nevertheless, the parties on the right (AP, MSP and MHP) 29 succeeded in forming a coalition government, the so-called ‘National Front’ (Milliyetçi Cephe) in 1975. As a particular consequence of the publications of the society, in which great praise was heaped on Atatürk, Kemalism, and the military with respect to the Turkish nation, the ideological influence of the society on the bureaucracy and the military grew rapidly. They supported the military coup d’état of September 12, 1980, after which the concept of TIS, and also the relations between the protagonists, gained a pivotal official dimension. 30 With its farreaching implications, the coup d’état is regarded as the defining event for both state and society after the foundation of the Republic. It aimed to eliminate the old political leadership, as well

İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk-İslam Sentezi, (İstanbul, 1985). D. Zeller-Mohrlok, Die Türkisch-Islamische, pp. 26–30. 29 AP: Adalet Partisi (Justice Party), MSP: Millî Selamet Partisi (National Salvation Party), MHP: Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (Nationalist Movement Party). 30 Umit Kurt, ‘The Doctrine of ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’ as Official Ideology of the September 12 and the ‘Intellectuals’ Hearth – Aydınlar Ocağı´ as the Ideological Apparatus of the State’, European Journal of Economic and Political Studies, 3 (2010), pp. 114–16. 27 28

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as the extreme political polarization of the Turkish population. 31 To counter political and social polarization, the military 32 presented itself at the political, ideological and social levels as the guardian and custodian of TIS. According to the military perspective, it was the deep politicization of all sectors of society that was responsible for the political chaos in Turkey. 33 They aimed at a comprehensive and profound de-politicization, implemented by the Constitution of 1982. Drafted by the military, this new constitution has influenced both the political system and the political culture in the country up to the present day. After the coup d’état, religion was supposed to serve as the community-forging force to create a social consensus. In the course of this re-orientation, Islam was rediscovered by the government as a resource of legitimacy to counter political extremism, especially communism, as well as the political and social fragmentation of Turkey. 34 Thus, TIS offered opportunities for both the indoctrination of the citizens and the legitimization of the ruling circle. By the same token, following the dismissal of the military government on November 6, 1983, TIS Günther Seufert and Christopher Kubaseck, Die Türkei. Politik. Geschichte. Kultur, 2nd ed., (München, 2006), p. 97. 32 For the function of the Turkish military and its acceptance in society and politics see Ümit Cizre, ‘Ideology, context and interest: the Turkish military’, in Turkey in the Modern World, Ed. Resad Kasaba, The Cambridge History of Turkey, Vol. 4, (Cambridge and New York, 2008), pp. 301–332. 33 Junta leader Kenan Evren called the coup d’état a measure to ensure the ‘protection and surveillance of the Republic’. See T. C. Başbakanlık (ed.). Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Devlet Bașkanı Orgeneral Kenan Evren’in Söylev ve Demeçleri (12 Eylül 1981–12 Eylül 1982) [Speeches and Addresses of the President of the Republic of Turkey General Kenan Evren (Sept. 12, 1981–Sept. 12, 1982)], (Ankara, 1982), p. 48. 34 Cemal Karakas, Türkei: Islam und Laizismus zwischen Staats-, Politikund Gesellschaftsinteressen, Hessische Stiftung Friedensund Konfliktforschung (HSFK)-Report 1, Frankfurt am Main, 2007, 18f, accessed December 12, 2014. http://www.hsfk.de/downloads/report 0107.pdf. TIS also carried anti-Arab and anti-Iranian connotations, particularly against the Iranian Revolution of 1979. See ibid. 31

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enabled the first civil government of the ANAP party, 35 under its leader Turgut Özal, to establish a close relationship with both a religious, as well as a right-wing nationalist constituency. 36 The new re-orientation of the state was programmatically enforced by this government. The effectiveness of TIS did not stop at the political level; its reach encompassed the education system and the official historiography. 37 During this period, the deployment and propagation of TIS was increasingly used as an identity-creating, consensus-building and legitimizing factor by the military, the ruling party, and right-wing nationalist parties. It also led to a greater appreciation and functionalization of the Diyanet.

DIYANET : AN INDISPENSABLE INSTITUTION?

The desire of the state to keep religion, (that is, the influence of religion on the population) under control, 38 is embodied by a state institution, Diyanet. 39 Contrary to what one might expect, the function of this institution is far more ideological than religious. Both the historical development and the legal basis of Diyanet are rather complex issues. 40 Based on laicism as a pillar of legitimacy, it was founded on March 3, 1924. At the time of its foundation three laws concerning the religious sector, which were ANAP: Anavatan Partisi (Motherland Party) See D. Zeller-Mohrlok, Die Türkisch-Islamische, p. 69f. 37 See B. Agai, Netzwerk und Diskurs, pp. 93–95. 38 As a study on the subject of Islam and laicism see C. Karakas, Türkei: Islam, pp. 6–12. 39 The exact official title is T.C. Başbakanlık Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı. Initially Diyanet İşleri Reisliği. 40 On the history of the Presidency see İrfan Yücel, ‘Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı’ [Presidency of Religious Affairs], in İslam Ansiklopedisi, Ed. Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, Vol. 9, (Istanbul, 1994), pp. 455–460. A special issue of The Muslim World is dedicated to a multi-perspective look at the Diyanet. Some of authors are present or former functionaries of the Diyanet itself. see: The Muslim World, A Special Issue on the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey: DIYANET, Special Editor Gazi Erdem, (2008), p. 98. 35 36

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passed simultaneously, were decisive: the law on the Abolishment of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowment (Şer`iyye ve Evkaf Vekaleti) (no: 429), which was the successor of the Ottoman Office of the Şeyhülislam and the Ministry of Endowment; the Law of Unification of Education (Tevhid-i Tedrisat) (no: 430); and the law on the Abolishment of the Caliphate (no: 431). 41 Following a number of legal regulations, Diyanet was incorporated into the state apparatus as a constitutional institution in the Constitution of 1961. Its function, however, was only specified in the Constitution of 1982. 42 The designation Diyanet is itself a specific term whose application to any other person or institution except Diyanet is not permitted. 43 Islam, which had previously served as a religious link between the various ethnic groups, had been actively dismantled as a uniting bond during the period of one-party-rule (1925–1946). Since then, the control and guidance of religion has been an important instrument of legitimization for the power elites. 44 The position of Diyanet was greatly strengthened once TIS was applied as a community-forging force, introduced after the military coup of 1980 and further specified in the constitution of 1982. According to Article 136 of the constitution, its function is defined as follows: Resmi Ceride [Official Gazette], No: 68, Ramazan 4, 1342 [March 3, 1924], p. 2f. 42 For a recent and very detailed analysis of the legal basis see Ramazan Uslubaş, Das Präsidium für Diyanet-Angelegenheiten der Republik Türkei. Geschichte und rechtliche Ausgestaltung, (Frankfurt am Main et al., 2014), pp. 139–175. 43 Article 1 of “Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı Kuruluş ve Görevleri Hakkında Kanun.” [Law on the Foundation and Tasks of the Presidency of Religious Affairs], Law No. 633, Resmî Gazete, (July 2, 1965), No. 12038, p. 4121. 44 The Kemalist party, the Republican People`s Party (CHP), felt itself compelled to revoke some of its measures concerning religion. It introduced religious education in schools, legalized the pilgrimage and opened new training facilities for prayer leaders (imams) and preachers, such as the so-called İmam-Hatip Okulları. See B. Agai, Netzwerk und Diskurs, p. 78f. 41

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The Presidency of Religious Affairs, which is within the general administration, shall exercise its duties prescribed in its particular law, in accordance with the principles of secularism, removed from all political views and ideas, and aiming at national solidarity and integrity. 45

The self-description of Diyanet completely corresponds to these constitutional and legal provisions. The aforesaid precepts are mentioned first among the basic principles and aims. 46 In the new constitution, the term ‘Islamic’ was not even mentioned, whilst a religious authority had just been assigned to promote ‘national solidarity and integration’. 47 The main objective of the Constitution of 1982 had been the de-politicization of social groups, civil society and the education sector. The legal strengthening of the Diyanet aimed to procure a new social consensus and, thus, enforce the project of de-politicization. With its institutional structure (numerous departments in the head office in the capital together with subordinate provincial and foreign organizations, and a workforce of 119,845 employees including 78,047 imams) Diyanet is a powerful and still growing instrument of the Turkish state. 48 In 2014, the proportion of funding given to the Diyanet in the state budget was larger than that of the Interior Ministry or the Ministry of Health. 49 Emphasis added by the current author. “Temel İlke ve Hedefler” [Main Principles and Aims], T.C. Başbakanlık Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, accessed December 12, 2014, http://www.diyanet.gov.tr/tr/kategori/temel-ilke-ve-hedefler/23. 47 C. Karakas, Türkei: Islam, pp. 18–19. 48 T.C. Başbakanlık Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (ed.), Faaliyet Raporu 2013 [Activity Report 2013], (Ankara, 2014), p. 14. The total number of employees was 80,153 in 2009. See T.C. Başbakanlık Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (ed.), Faaliyet Raporu 2009 [Activity Report 2009], (Ankara, 2010), 14. On structural changes in the Presidency from 1924 to 2009, see İştar Gözaydın, Diyanet. Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nde Dinin Tanzimi [Diyanet: The Regulation of Religion in the Republic of Turkey], (Istanbul, 2009). 49 Helsinki Citizens Assembly (ed.), Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı Araştırması. Algılar, Memnuniyetler, Beklentiler [Poll on the Presidency of Religious Affairs. Perceptions, Contentedness, Expectations], (October, 45 46

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Diyanet is the sole executive authority governing religious affairs. By means of the office of the mufti (müftülük), established in every administrative city (il and ilçe), 50 it is well organized in the provinces, all the way down to the district capitals. This dense network, that corresponds to the structures of municipal administration, allows the government to control and guide religion according to the principle of laicism. Thus, Diyanet also functions as a guarantor against radical tendencies. The most important tasks of Diyanet include the administration and control of the mosques, the organization of pilgrimage and the control and censorship of religious publications, as well as the religious services inside the mosques, including the five daily prayers led by imams. 51 Mosques have restricted opening hours: only the centrally located mosques, with more than one imam, used to be open from the noontime prayer until after the night prayer. Other mosques were only open shortly before the prayers and then closed immediately afterwards. In March 2013, Diyanet decreed that the more generous opening hours should be extended to all mosques. 52 With regard to the local management, there is a tendency towards centralization. Although the muezzins are obliged to call to prayer, the call is made in a centralized way through electronic synchronization in the cities. In a similar way, the weekly Friday sermons are drafted by respective Mufti Offices of the ‘Provincial Commission of Sermons’, which means that the same sermon is delivered all over the city. Since 2006, imams may 2014), 8, accessed December 12, 2014. The document is available on the website of the opinion poll institute KONDA: www.konda.tr. 50 The local administration is divided into 81 provincal capitals (il) and 919 district cities (ilçe). 51 Article 1 of ‘Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı Kuruluş ve Görevleri Hakkında Kanun’ [Law on the Foundation and Tasks of the Presidency of Religious Affairs], Law No. 633, Resmî Gazete [Official Gazette], (July 2, 1965), No. 12038, 4121. 52 T.C. Başbakanlık Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (ed.), Camilerin Açık Tutulması Genelgesi [Decree on Mosque Opening Hours], (March 5, 2013), 1. This document is available at: http://www2.diyanet.gov.tr/Din HizmetleriGenelMudurlugu/Sayfalar/AnaSayfa.aspx

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hold their individual sermons, but these have first to be reviewed by the aforesaid commission. 53 Its foreign organization consists of advisory boards, attachés and coordination centers for religious services. In this way, Diyanet authority is also extended to the religious affairs of Turkish citizens abroad. In order to assert its influence in other countries, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DİTİB) was founded in Germany in 1985. 54 This organization, whose statutes are in conformity with German association law, whilst at the same time attached to, and supervised by the Turkish state, was supposed to contain the influence of other Islamic groups and, thus, counter the activities of oppositional movements. 55 The imams sent to work abroad are civil servants of the Turkish state who receive their salaries from the respective consulate. On the German side, the affiliation with the Turkish state is not necessarily seen in a negative way; in fact, the organization has become significantly more important since September 11, 2001. Because DİTİB strictly upholds the principle of laicism of the Turkish state, its role in the struggle against Islamist terrorism is acknowledged and supported by the German government. Since the initialization of the German Islamic Conference (Deutsche Islamkonferenz) in 2006 by the German Interior Ministry, Islam has been perceived as a ‘link between inclusion and security policies’ and, as a consequence, there are

İzzet Er: ‘Religious Services of the PRA’, The Muslim World, A Special Issue on the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey: DIYANET, Special Editor Gazi Erdem, 98 (2008), p. 273. 54 Die Türkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt für Religion e.V (Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği). For a survey on the function and position of DİTİB see Michael Kiefer, ‘Die DİTİB in der Zuwanderungsgesellschaft – Garant oder Hindernis der Integration?’, Islamverherrlichung. Wenn die Kritik zum Tabu wird, Ed. Thorsten Gerald Schneiders, (Wiesbaden, 2010), pp. 287–293. 55 See G. Seufert, Staat und Islam. 53

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demands to grant DİTİB a church-like legal status. 56 Similar to the Christian churches, DİTİB is considered a corporate body under public law by the German government and, therefore, a representative of the Turkish-Muslim community. Paradoxically, this has led to a functional change to DİTİB: a strictly religious organization, which is prohibited to interfere in public affairs in its own country, becomes a point of contact in social matters abroad. 57 There are, however, many elements of religious life in the educational sector that are under the direct control of the state and, hence, beyond the reach of Diyanet: the Theological Faculties are subordinate to the Council for Universities, founded in 1983, 58 and schools are supervised by the Ministry of Education, which prevents Diyanet from exerting influence on curricula and on the instructional process. The same holds true for the Schools for Imams and Preachers (İmam Hatip Liseleri), 59 whose alumni are See Dirk Halm, Der Islam als Diskursfeld. Bilder des Islams in Deutschland, 2nd ed., (Wiesbaden, 2008), p. 70f. 57 For a critical analysis of the ‘German Islam policy’ see D. Halm, Der Islam als Diskursfeld, pp. 73–79. 58 As autonomous corporations of public law, universities and higher education institutions are under the authority of the University Council (Yüksek Öğretim Kurumu, YÖK), which holds exclusive control in the field of academic education. 59 An earlier form of the Schools for Imams and Preachers (İmam Hatip Mektepleri) was founded in 1924 as a successor of the Ottoman school for training of imams and preachers. However, in 1930 these schools were closed due to lack of students. Under the name İmam Hatip Kursları, but with the same function, 10-month courses for imams were introduced in 1949 by the Republican People’s Party (CHP). In 1951, the Democratic Party (DP) led government established a new form of schools (İmam Hatip Okulları). Thus, these schools have always been a pawn of the respective governments and political parties. For an overview on the history of these schools see: Ruşen Çakır et al., İmam Hatip Liseleri: Efsaneler ve Gerçekler [Schools for Imams and Preachers: Legends and Truths], (Istanbul, 2004), p. 15, pp. 54–71, accessed December 12, 2014. 56

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supposed to later become employees of the Diyanet. The authority of Diyanet in education is limited to the teaching of Koran courses 60 and organizational matters related to those courses. At this point it is vital to note that in accordance with the principle of laicism, the construction of mosques is outside the purview of Diyanet, a point that, in most cases, is ignored in the scientific discussion. 61 Diyanet is responsible for the inauguration of the mosques but not for their construction. 62 The building of mosques is exclusively the domain of grass roots and private initiatives. On the other hand, it is out of the question for the state to leave the religious sector exclusively to the religious communities. However, the control of the mosques by Diyanet has been closely monitored. Both Diyanet itself, as well as its employees, have to be considered official instruments of control. As civil servants, the imams ensure that the religious needs of even the smallest villages of Anatolia are fulfilled within an officially circumscribed framework and that they will not turn against the state. As a means of access to the public, the weekly sermons in the mosques constitute a suitable medium for the government’s objectives. Diyanet centrally drafts them so that subjects relevant to the political agenda can be raised with a wider public within the frame of a religious context. 63 http://www.tesev.org.tr/assets/publications/file/IH%20EfsanelerGercekler.pdf. 60 These courses must only be attended by participants who have attained the age of 15, i.e., after graduation from the eight-year elementary school. See Seufert, Staat und Islam, p. 17. 61 As an example: ‘It is, for example, responsible for the Construction and conservation of mosques […].’ see M. Kiefer, Die DİTİB, p. 289. 62 See, for example, T.C. Başbakanlık Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı (ed.), (ed.), Faaliyet Raporu 2013, p. 21. 63 The community is, for example, called upon to pay its debts or to make a donation to the fund of the Turkish Air Force. In such cases the religious rhetoric is employed to legitimize national and military requirements within the framework of laical religious politics. The term ‘kutsal’, which in a religious context means ‘sacred’, is also used in a non-

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Like any other public servant, the employees of the Diyanet are obliged to swear an oath of office. This oath is codified in the law concerning public servants in the section ‘Loyalty’ (sadakat): I swear upon my honor and dignity, that I will remain loyal to the Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, to the reforms and principles of Atatürk, to Turkish nationalism, as expressed in the Constitution; that I will enact the laws of the Turkish Republic, in the service of the people and according to the principles of neutrality and equality; that I will internalize the national, ethnic, human, mental and cultural values of the Turkish nation, and to endeavor to develop them further; in awareness that my tasks and obligations towards the Turkish Republic, which is a nationalist, democratic, laical constitutional state, shall translate into my conduct. 64

The law on civil servants regulates their obligation to the principles of equality and to loyalty to the state, and explicitly forbids any religious context, for instance: ‘The taxed profit is sacred’ (vergilendirilmiş kazanç kutsaldır). 64 Translation by the author. The original text reads: “Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Anayasasına, Atatürk İnkılap ve İlkelerine, Anayasada ifadesi bulunan Türk Milliyetçiliğine sadakatla bağlı kalacağıma; Türkiye Cumhuriyeti kanunlarını milletin hizmetinde olarak tarafsız ve eşitlik ilkelerine bağlı kalarak uygulayacağıma; Türk Milletinin milli, ahlaki, insani, manevi ve kültürel değerlerini benimseyip, koruyup bunları geliştirmek için çalışacağıma; insan haklarına ve Anayasanın temel ilkelerine dayanan milli, demokratik, laik, bir hukuk devleti olan Türkiye Cumhuriyetine karşı görev ve sorumluluklarını bilerek, bunları davranış halinde göstereceğime namusum ve şerefim üzerine yemin ederim.” Article 6 of “Devlet Memurları Kanunu” [Law of Public Servants], Law No. 657, Resmî Gazete, July 23, 1965, No. 12056, p. 4182. Also mentioned is the oath for which government clerks lay their hands on the Turkish flag on the table, see Article 8 of the “Asli Devlet Memurluğuna Atananların Yemin Merasimi Yönetmeliği” [By-laws on the Swearing-in Ceremony for Apointees to Full-time Public Servant Status], Cabinet Decision No 8/5483, Resmî Gazete, (November 30, 1982), No. 17884, p. 4.

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political and ideological activities. 65 Diyanet is particularly careful to fill any uncontrolled space arising within newly constructed mosques that may, potentially, give room to dissident voices. By law, newly erected buildings must obtain official permission to operate as legal mosques under Diyanet`s control within three months of their completion. 66 Among the activities of Diyanet listed in its activity report, it is, for example, noted in the section on ‘Proposals and Measures’, that all over the country numerous completed mosques existed for which no human resources could be found due to the lack of personnel and financial resources. These were urgently needed, both to prevent possible illegal activities and, furthermore, to regulate religious affairs centrally and to keep them under governmental control. 67 This demonstrates the primary approach of the power elite to, a priori, defame all activities that take place outside the centralized control as ‘illegal’. The role of Diyanet consists in defining religion in the private sector and determining how it is to be practiced. The laicist policy on religion facilitates the unification of religion and nation within the frame of the republican project, thus embedding both in the collective memory of the population. 68 Good insights into the implementation of the laicist policy on religion can be found in both the analyses of the genesis of the schools for prayer leaders and preachers, 69 and on foreign cultural policy, which, not least, can be seen as a religious cultural policy. 70 Article 7 of “Devlet Memurları Kanunu”, p. 4182f. Article 35 of “Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı Kuruluş ve Görevleri Hakkında Kanun”, p. 4127. 67 Diyanet (ed.), Faaliyet Raporu 2009, p. 82. 68 This concept is epitomized by the famous slogan, ‘The call for prayer must not stop, the flag must not be taken down’ (ezan susmaz, bayrak inmez). 69 In the beginning, these schools were not initiated by the state, but were constructed or financed by citizens within the context of a commitment to civil society. They were later partially abandoned by the memorandum of 1997. See B. Agai, Netzwerk und Diskurs, p. 104f. 70 The state attaches great importance to religious activities for the creation of religious identity abroad. For example, Diyanet ensures that 65 66

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As to public perceptions of Diyanet, the most recent poll by the KONDA polling institute, commissioned by the Turkish branch of the Helsinki Citizens Assembly and conducted in all 32 provincial capitals in October 2014, 71 showed that a majority of the population does not see a contradiction between the existence of the Diyanet and the principle of laicism: According to three quarters of the interviewees, Diyanet is an institution that executes affairs concerning religion and whose existence does not contradict the principle of laicism. For a quarter of interviewees, Diyanet is a political institution that contradicts the principle of laicism. 72

It is interesting to note that the opinion that Diyanet ‘does not contradict the principle of laicism’, is generally shared by all groups regardless of age, education and lifestyle. Fundamental differences can only be found with regard to the religious affiliation, personal piety or political orientation of the interviewees. 73 Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed consider it acceptable that Diyanet appoints religious functionaries, such as muftis, imams and muezzins. 74 A point of public criticism is the fact that the president of Diyanet is not elected, but appointed to this office. There is also the claim that women should receive greater representation in Diyanet. 75 A further important point of public criticism lies in the fact that the presidency only represents the Hanafi law school of Sunni Islam and thus excludes, for instance, the Alevis. So the question as to how the needs and demands of members of the Alevi community can be fulfilled remains unresolved. Among the Alevis themselves, opinions differ on whether they should be represented the Turkish experience on the religious field is made public abroad and the religion of Islam is understood properly. Diyanet (ed.), Faaliyet Raporu 2013, p. 32, p. 59f. 71 Helsinki Citizens Assembly (ed.), Diyanet İşleri. 72 Ibid., p. 8. Translation by the author. 73 Ibid., p. 5. 74 Ibid., p. 8. 75 Ibid., p. 8, p. 43.

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within the structures of Diyanet, and how such representation should be organized. 76 From a historical perspective, Alevism is merely regarded as some sort of sub-culture within the frame of a homogenously conceived nation state, within which its autonomy is not recognized. 77 A first serious dialogue between the Diyanet and the Alevis was initiated in the 1990s. Prior to that time, there was no mention of the Alevi community in Diyanet publications. During the last decade, a certain progress has been achieved. The Cem Hauses (Cemevleri) have officially been recognized as places of worship. Alevi holy days and ceremonies are mentioned in Friday sermons and periodicals. Until now, eleven Alevi sources have been edited in the ‘Alevi-Baktashi Classics’ publication series. 78 Ultimately, it must be stated that the conflict between the state (and the Diyanet) and the Alevis is not based on religion, but that it is the secular concept of the unitary state that is at issue.

CONCLUSION

It has been the main objective of this article to present the complex, closely intertwined relationship of the Turkish ideological triangle: laicism and nationalism as the two fundamental principles of the constitution, and religion, as represented by Diyanet as a government agency. Turkish nation building rests on these three elastic pillars whose flexibility has enabled the structures of this Diyanet to be adapted to changing political and social situations. Due to the close connection of nation building and religious policy, the government and political systems of Turkey are stronger and Sönmez Kutlu, ‘The Presidency of Religious Affairs’ Relationship with Religious Groups (Sect/Sufi orders) in Turkey’, in The Muslim World, A Special Issue on the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey: DIYANET, Special Editor Gazi Erdem, 98 (2008), pp. 253–256. 77 See Andreas Gorzewski, Das Alevitentum in seinen divergierenden Verhältnisbestimmungen zum Islam, (Schenefeld, 2010), pp. 64–73. On the demands of Alevi organizations to the government, see ibid., pp. 73–78. 78 S. Kutlu, ‘The Presidency’, p. 259. Also, Ömer Turan, ‘The Turkish Diyanet Foundation’, The Muslim World, A Special Issue on the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey: DIYANET, Special Editor Gazi Erdem, 98 (2008), p. 376. 76

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more stable than in most countries in the region, not least due to the firmer integration of religion into state and society in the Republic of Turkey. The primary focus of this religious policy is less about faith than it is about the legitimation of the state. In light of the 92-year history of the Republic, one may observe that, next to language, religion has been the most successful element in the process of nation building. This religious policy has never entertained any connection to the idea of the creation of an Islamist theocracy. Its sole purpose has been to render legitimacy to the state, to shape the nation and, ultimately, to stabilize society. This role, however, has been increasingly assigned to religion since the 1980s by the ideology of the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis. The laicist religious policy has made it possible to merge religion and the nation into a single entity under the republican project, thus rooting both in the collective memory of the Turkish population. Whether the existence of Diyanet is in contradiction to laicism is still a matter of debate. This does not alter the fact that during its ninety years of existence (which makes it almost as old as the Republic itself) Diyanet has firmly established itself in Turkish society and enjoys broad social acceptance. Neither laicism nor the existence of Diyanet is questioned. This model has created a consensus for a broad range of social classes and various political groups. To put at stake this achievement, as well as its function as a state apparatus, is something that no political party or social group can risk doing. No one can satisfactorily answer the question of how the vacuum created by the abolition of the Diyanet could be filled. The abolition of the Diyanet, however, has never been an issue in Turkish politics or civil society. Beyond doubt, the existence of Diyanet provides a stronghold against extremist groups, no small thing given the present situation where Islamist terrorism is rampant in many countries. The fact that Diyanet represents Sunni Islam as the only officially recognized religion has rightly been disputed. In this respect, better account should be taken of the needs of the Alevis. If this should happen – and I believe that the government will follow this path – it will only strengthen the position of the Diyanet.

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Culture in the Early Republic, (Washington, 2001). Yılmaz Bulut, Laizismus oder übergreifende Säkularität des Rechtsstaates? Der Diskurs um den Laizismus in der Türkei, (Berlin et al., 2008). Ümit Cizre, ‘Ideology, context and interest: the Turkish military’, Ed. Resad Kasaba, Turkey in the Modern World, The Cambridge History of Turkey, Vol. 4, (Cambridge and New York, 2008). Çakır Ruşen, İrfan Bozan, Balkan Talu, İmam Hatip Liseleri: Efsaneler ve Gerçekler [Schools for Imams and Preachers: Legends and Truths], (Istanbul, 2004), accessed December 12, 2014. http://www.tesev.org.tr/assets/publications/file/IH%20Efsa neler-Gercekler.pdf. Constitution of the Republic of Turkey, accessed December 4, 2014. http://global.tbmm.gov.tr/docs/constitution_en.pdf. İzzet Er, ‘Religious Services of the PRA’, The Muslim World, A Special Issue on the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey: DIYANET, Special Editor Gazi Erdem, 98 (2008). Andreas Gorzewski, Das Alevitentum in seinen divergierenden Verhältnisbestimmungen zum Islam, (Schenefeld, 2010). İştar Gözaydın, Diyanet. Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nde Dinin Tanzimi [Diyanet. The Regulation of Religion in the Republic of Turkey], (Istanbul, 2009). Kemal Gözler, Türk Anayasa Hukuku [Turkish Constitutional Law], (Bursa, 2000). Halil Gülbeyaz, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – Vom Staatsgründer zum Mythos, 2nd ed., (Berlin, 2004). Geoffrey Haig, ‘The Invisibilisation of Kurdish: The Other Side of Language Planning in Turkey’, in Die Kurden. Studien zu ihrer Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Ed. Stephan Conermann, Geoffrey Haig, Asien und Afrika, Vol. 8, (Schenefeld, 2004). Dirk Halm, Der Islam als Diskursfeld. Bilder des Islams in Deutschland, 2nd ed., (Wiesbaden, 2008). Helsinki Citizens Assembly (ed.), Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı Araştırması. Algılar, Memnuniyetler, Beklentiler [Poll on the Presidency of Religious Affairs. Perceptions, Contentedness, Expectations], October 2014, accessed December 12, 2014. www.konda.tr Jochen Hippler, ‘Violent Conflicts, Conflict Prevention and Nation-Building – Terminology and Political Concepts’, in

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Nation-Building – A Key Concept for Peaceful Conflict Transformation?, Ed. Jochen Hippler, (London and Ann Arbor, 2005). İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Türk-İslam Sentezi, (İstanbul, 1985). Ahmet İnsel (ed.), Kemalizm [Kemalism], Modern Türkiye`de Siyasi Düşünce [Political Ideas in Modern Turkey], Vol. 2, (Istanbul, 2002). Metin Karabaşoğlu, ‘İslâm ve Milliyetçilik Arasındaki İlişki ve Etkileşim’ [Relation and Interrelation between Islam and Nationalism], in Dönemler ve Zihniyetler [Epochs and Mentalities], Eds. Tanıl Bora, Murat Gültekingil, (İstanbul, 2009). Cemal Karakas, Türkei: Islam und Laizismus zwischen Staats-, Politikund Gesellschaftsinteressen, Hessische Stiftung Friedens- und Konfliktforschung (HSFK)-Report 1, (Frankfurt am Main, 2007), accessed December 12, 2014. http://www.hsfk.de/downloads/report0107.pdf Michael Kiefer, ‘Die DİTİB in der Zuwanderungsgesellschaft – Garant oder Hindernis der Integration?’, in Islamverherrlichung. Wenn die Kritik zum Tabu wird, Ed. Thorsten Gerald Schneiders, (Wiesbaden, 2010). Umit Kurt, ‘The Doctrine of ‘Turkish-Islamic Synthesis’ as Official Ideology of the September 12 and the ‘Intellectuals’ Hearth – Aydınlar Ocağı’ as the Ideological Apparatus of the State’, European Journal of Economic and Political Studies, 3 (2010). Ahmet T. Kuru, ‘Reinterpretation of Secularism in Turkey. The Case of the Justice and Development Party’, in The Emergence of a New Turkey. Democracy and the AK Party, Ed. M. Hakan Yavuz, (Salt Lake City, 2006) Sönmez Kutlu, ‘The Presidency of Religious Affairs’ Relationship with Religious Groups (Sect/Sufi orders) in Turkey’, The Muslim World, A Special Issue on the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey: DIYANET, Special Editor Gazi Erdem, 98 (2008). Mehmet Mihri Özdogan, Nation und Symbol. Der Prozess der Nationalisierung am Beispiel der Türkei, (Frankfurt am Main at al, 2007).

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Resmî Gazete [Official Gazette], No. 12038 (July 2, 1965); No. 12056 (July 23, 1965); No. 17884 (November 30, 1982) Resmi Ceride [Official Gazette], No. 68, March 3, 1924 Christian Rumpf, Das türkische Verfassungssystem, (Wiesbaden, 1996). Yusuf Sarınay, ‘The Emergence of Turkish Nationalism under the Ottoman Empire’, in The Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilisation III, Philosophy, Science and Institution, Ed. Kemal Çiçek, (Ankara, 2000). Günther Seufert, Christopher Kubaseck, Die Türkei. Politik. Geschichte. Kultur, 2nd ed., (München, 2006). Günther Seufert, Staat und Islam in der Türkei, SWP-Studie, Berlin (2004), accessed December 12, 2014. http://www.swpberlin.org/fileadmin/contents/products/stu dien/2004_S29_seufert_ks.pdf Yümni Sezen, Türk Toplumunun Laiklik Anlayışı [The Understanding of Laicism in the Turkish Society], (Istanbul, 1993). The Muslim World, A Special Issue on the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey: DIYANET, Special Editor Gazi Erdem, 98, (2008). Ömer Turan, ‘The Turkish Diyanet Foundation’, The Muslim World, A Special Issue on the Presidency of Religious Affairs in Turkey: DIYANET, Special Editor Gazi Erdem, 98 (2008). Ramazan Uslubas, Das Präsidium für Diyanet-Angelegenheiten der Republik Türkei. Geschichte und rechtliche Ausgestaltung, (Frankfurt am Main [u.a.], 2014). Johannes Weiß, ‘Nation-building’, in Politikwissenschaft. TheorienMethoden-Begriffe, Ed. Dieter Nohlen, Rainer-Olaf Schultze, Pipers Wörterbuch zur Politik, Vol. 1, (München, 1985). İrfan Yücel, ‘Diyanet İşleri BaşkanlığIì [Presidency of Religious Affairs] in İslam Ansiklopedisi, Ed. Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, Vol. 9, (Istanbul, 1994). Dagmar Zeller-Mohrlok, Die Türkisch-Islamische Synthese. Eine Strategie zur Kanalisierung innen-politischer und wirtschaftlicher Konflikte der Türkei in den 80er Jahren, (Bonn, 1998).

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM FATEMEH SHAYAN 1 This chapter enters the debate on Jundallah, which has become an existential threat to the Shia state and society of Iran since its emergence in 2003. Much research has focused on the Baloch and Balochestan in Iran. However, researchers have failed to fully cover radical religious and nationalist goals of Jundallah. First, this chapter investigates the Baloch in the current history of Iran and that Jundallah originated from the Baloch. Second, it studies the targets of Jundallah such as widening the ShiaSunni conflict, protecting rights of the Balochi people and attempting for independence from Iran. The chapter concludes that Jundallah’s radical religious nationalism in Sistan and Balochestan has been connected to violence and its exclusion from the Iranian majority society.

INTRODUCTION

This article argues that Jundallah (Soldiers of God) is rooted in a radical Sunni and Baloch identity. The expansion of the Shi‘a– Sunni conflict in Iran and acts of terror conducted by Jundallah are the indicators that must be examined in order to determine whether or not the organization could assimilate into majority Dr. Fatemeh Shayan is a lecturer at Isfahan University, Iran, and a post-doctoral scholar of International Relations at University of Tampere Finland. 1

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Iranian society. It is important to note that, although Jundallah has placed radical interpretations on religious messages, Islam is a religion of peace. Jundallah emerged as a terrorist organization on the eastern border of Iran around 2003–2004. It has motivated the Baloch in Sistan & Balochestan to reclaim their Sunni and Baloch nationalist goals. The purpose of the organization, according to the 2011 and 2012 news on the Jundallah website, has been to defend the rights of the Baloch people and Sunnis in Sistan & Balochestan vis-à-vis the Shi‘a Iranian majority. 2 Jundallah has highlighted both religious and Baloch nationalist claims (in addition to a claim on independence) conducting acts of terror against Shi‘a citizens and officials living in Sistan & Balochestan. For the purpose of this article, Jundallah is defined as a radical religious organization with nationalist goals emerging from the minority Baloch people embedded within the Iranian majority society. This clarification makes a distinction between Jundallah, with its Baloch nationalist goals, and other terrorist groups outside Iran conducting sectarian struggles in Syria, Yemen and Iraq. They are transnational actors from different nations, and their sectarian acts of terror are not intended to promote nationalist goals. This article therefore highlights the role of nationalism in relation to Jundallah. The article asks: In what identity is Jundallah rooted? Could its identity be assimilated within the Iranian Shi‘a majority? To address this question, it is necessary to trace the Baloch origins of Jundallah. Among the differing views on the roots of the Baloch people, the two most prevalent are that they are either of Arab or of Iranian origin. Members of the Mobarki tribe, for example, have in past years insisted that they are Arab, attributing their origins to the generation of Hamza, the uncle of the Prophet Mohammad. 3 Nevertheless, Siddiqi argue that this viewpoint is not accepted by Jundallah Website 2010 and 2011, various news, available at: http://jonbesh-mardom.blogspot.fi/, retrieved December 12, 2014. 3 cf., Iraj Afshar Sistani, Introduction to Recognize Tribes, Nomadic and Nomadic Tribes in Iran, (Tehran, 1988), p. 492. 2

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 279 the majority of Baloch people. 4 Hamid Ahmadi elaborates that radical pan-Arab groups state that the Baloch people are of Arab origin, and have attempted to organize ethnic crisis in Sistan & Balochestan. 5 They pursue an independence agenda, and radical Sunnism has recently increased security issues along the eastern border of Iran. 6 The second view, that the origin of the Baloch is Iranian, has found greater acceptance among researchers. For example, Dashti argues that a group of tribes left their territory in Central Asia three thousand years ago. Among them there were Indo-Iranian peoples settled in the north-western Iranian region of Blashagan – an area around the Caspian Sea and Lake Van. He refers to another suggestion concerning the Iranian origin of the Baloch, which they might be from Kerman in Iran. His assumption is based on an interpretation of several Baloch legends and texts by medieval Arab historians. Dashti also relies on 20th century research into Iranian languages, which provides a clear picture of ancient Baloch and that the Baloch language bears affinities to both middle Persian and Parthian. 7 The Balashchiks of Balashgan later moved into Kerman, Sistan and Makran in Iran as wandering pastoralists who adopted an ethnic Baloch identity. At this period, the Baloch were in conflict with various regional powers, but their culture dominated in various tribes of the Sistan region. 8

Akhtar Husain Siddiqi, Baluchistan (Pakistan): Its Society Resources, and Development, (Lanham, 1991), p. 18. 5 Ahmadi Hamid, ‘Baloch Leaders and Ethnic Identity’, Rashekhon Net, October 31, 2014. 6 Ehsan Hooshmand, ‘Discussion with Dr. Hamid Ahmadi: Iranian Tribes and the Story of Common National Identity’, Iran, April 13, 2014. 7 Naseer Dashti, The Baloch and Balochestan: A Historical Account from the Beginning to the Fall of the Baloch State, (Bloomington, 2012), p. 1, p. 30, p. 32. 8 Ibid., pp. 8–9. 4

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BACKGROUND: JUNDALLAH WITH A RADICAL RELIGIOUS AND NATIONALIST GOALS Baloch and Balochestan in the Current Iranian History The term ‘Baloch’ refers to the ethnic group primarily located in Sistan & Balochestan, in the southeastern regions of Iran. 9 To contextualize the current history of the Baloch, a brief historical overview of the past centuries is first required. Throughout the history of Iran, the Baloch people have considered themselves subject to discrimination at the hands of the Persian majority. Balochestan was the location of many early human civilizations from the 10th century BC. The Arab invasion of Balochestan in the 7th century AD had impacts on its social, religious and economic affairs. During the anarchic and chaotic last phases of Arab rule in the 15th century, Baloch tribes established semi-independent tribal confederacies. By the 18th century, the Kalat state, ruled by its Khans, was the dominant power in Balochestan. In 1839, however, Britain invaded Balochestan, and signed a treaty with the Kalat state in 1841. Another treaty was imposed on it by Britain in 1876. Under its terms, the Khan remained in power, but under the supervision of a British Minister. 10 In 1849, Iranian forces defeated Balochestan in Kerman and captured Bampur. This and other events led to the Baloch people losing their autonomy, and the rivalries between Britain and Russia pushed them into isolation. In 1872, the border agreement divided Balochestan between Iran and British India. In response to these developments, the Baloch began to project a modern national identity through a nationalist movement as a weapon to protect their own interests. Serious Baloch rebellions began to break out, notably in Jask in 1873 and Sarhad in 1888. In 1896, a major J. E. Peterson, ‘The Baloch Presence in the Persian Gulf’, in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, Ed. Lawrence Potter, (London, 2013), pp. 229–230. 10 UNPO, ‘West Balochestan’, (2010), available at: http://unpo.org/ images/member_profile/westbalochistanprofilepublisherjune%202010.pd f, retrieved 20.11.2014. 9

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 281 uprising took place under the leadership of Sardar Hossein, but it was defeated after two years. 11 From 1925, the Pahlavi dynasty centralized a Persian state in Iran since 1925. Baloch forces were defeated by the Iranian army, and Balochestan was annexed to Iran in 1928. Under the Pahlavi dynasty, minorities in Iran were classified into separate categories. During his reign, Reza Shah actively prompted the Persian language – already spoken by the majority − in teaching and publishing. This was complemented by a program of linguistic homogenization, which was viewed by the political authorities as a means to modernize Iran’s urban centers. 12 These policies were continued by his son and successor, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who utilized state machinery to foster national unity and establish control over all segments of the population. Rising oil revenues 13 also enabled to expand the influence of the Persian language into linguistic domains hitherto dominated by minorities. 14 Language has been crucial to the process of identity construction in Iran. Persian language and culture has long played a dominant role in Iranian society. 15 It is important to note that while Persian linguistic and cultural identities were promoted, the secular Pahlavi dynasty did not actively promote Shi‘a Islam. The pro-Persian policies of the Pahlavi Shahs have influenced the socio-economic and educational situations of minorities. 16 For example, while the rate of cent of literacy in Sistan & Balochestan 11 12

14–15.

Ibid., pp. 4–5. Eliz Sanasarian, Religious Minorities in Iran, (Cambridge, 2004), pp.

United Sates Energy Information Administration, ‘US FOB Costs of Persian Gulf Countries Crude Oil’, available at: http://www.eia.gov/ dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=I040000004&f=M., retrieved 12.10.2014. 14 E. Sanasarian, Religious Minorities, p. 17. 15 Lois Beck, ‘Iran’s Ethnic, Religious, and Tribal Minorities’, in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, Ed. Lawrence Potter, (London, 2013), pp. 284–249. 16 Ibid. 13

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is relatively high, it remains slightly lower than in Iran’s major urban centers. According to the Statistics Center of Iran (Reliable statistics on literacy do not exist for the period before the Revolution) the literacy rate for Iranians over six years old was 71.56% in Sistan & Balochestan, 87.77% in Isfahan and 90.46% in Tehran between 2006 and 2011. 17 Although the Baloch claim this was a deliberate process initiated in the Pahlavi era that continues to the current time, the Iranian government has refused this. One reason might be that Sistan & Balochestan is that Sistan & Balochestan is one of the Iran’s poorest and remotest provinces. While accurate statistics are not available for the Pahlavi era, in 2012, the Statistics Center of Iran stated it to be as low as 10%. 18 While the region is among Iran’s largest, it is also one of the driest and most remote. The province is chronically underdeveloped and has long suffered from a lack of investment. Owing to its proximity to Pakistan and Afghanistan, smuggling has become an important source of income for many of its inhabitants. 19 In contrast to the semi-secular Pahlavi regime, the Iranian state since 1979 has promoted a national identity based on Shi‘a Islam, reinforced by Persian culture and language. Under the Shah, the Baloch were culturally and linguistically isolated from mainstream Iranian society. After the Revolution, the Baloch people also found themselves discriminated against on the basis of Ibid., p. 38, p. 51. Khajehpour Bijan, ‘Sistan–Baluchestan: Rouhani’s Challenge’, AlMonitor, July 17, 2014; Yeganeh Salehi, ‘On the Road with Hassan Rouhani’, The National, April 15, 2014, available at: http://www.almonitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/rouhani-sistan-baluchistanimpossible-mission-1.html, retrieved 21.9.2014; The Statistics Center of Iran, “The Result of the Statistics of Population in Iran in 2011,” 2011, available at: http://www.amar.org.ir/Portals/0/sarshomari90/n_sarsho mari90_2.pdf, retrieved 20.8. 2014. 19 Khajehpour Bijan, ‘Sistan–Baluchestan: Rouhani’s Challenge’, AlMonitor, July 17, 2014; Yeganeh, Salehi, ‘On the Road with Hassan Rouhani’, The National, April 15, 2014, available at: http://www.almonitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/rouhani-sistan-baluchistanimpossible-mission-1.html, retrieved 21.9.2014. 17 18

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 283 their Sunni religious identity. This has reinforced existing economic inequalities. They also argue that religious and ethnic differences and the unequal distribution of socio-economic resources have intensified conflicts between Shi‘a and Sunni Iranians since 2003. 20 Of the various socio-economic problems in Sistan & Balochestan, most of the Baloch people suffer from unemployment. Abasali Nora, the former representative of people in Sistan & Balochestan, touched upon the issue, referring to the growth of black jobs there such as selling cigarette and smuggling gasoline as a result of unemployment. 21 In addition, the geographical proximity of Sistan & Balochestan to Afghanistan, where opium is grown, and to Pakistan, where heroin is produced, has made Sistan & Balochestan an international smuggling route, providing an illegal source of income for some local and international people. 22 Hossein Rahimi, the Commander of the Security Forces in Sistan & Balochestan, agrees on the high rate of unemployment and the illegal jobs in Sistan & Balochestan, and believes that unemployment is the root of social problems. Unemployment is still an ongoing issue in Sistan & Balochestan, without a feasible solution at present. Salzman sums up the contemporary situation of the Baloch in Iran by arguing that Balochestan was brought under Persian control and the Baloch were pacified and forced to accept the rules of central government. As a result, the position of the Baloch changed from being fighters to raiders. From being politically independent, they have become dependent on the state of Iran. Chris Zambelis, ‘Political Threat or Counterterrorism: Assessing Iran’s Capture of Jundallah Leader Abdelmalek Rigi’, Terrorism Monitor 8/13 (2010), pp. 1–5, available at: http://www.jamestown.org/programs/ tm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=36230&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid% 5D=26&cHash=2c7eae88e7#.VJXagAoPG, retrieved 16.12.2014. 21 Nora Abbasali, ‘Unemploment Leads People in Sistan and Balochestan to Smuggling, Iran Economy Online’, May 4, 2013, 1, available at: http://www.eghtesadeiranonline.com/vdcaumn6649nia1. k5k4.html, retrieved 10.9.2014. 22 Ahmad Reza Taheri, The Baloch Post-Islamic Revolution: A Political Study, (Pune, 2009), p. 47. 20

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From operating autonomously, they have become subject to Persian laws. Baloch language, dress, and knowledge were replaced by Persian. 23 In response to these changes, the Baloch people have resisted the central state to develop their national identity through politicization. Before proceeding further, it is necessary to clarify that “nationalism” and “the Baloch nation” in Iran are modern concepts. In the first decade of the 20th century, discontented Baloch people sought new forms of political expression in response to the territorial and administrative ambiguities in Sistan & Balochestan. After the foundation of the Young Baloch Movement and the Anjuman Ittihad Balochan (Baloch United Forum) in the 1920s, Baloch national awareness grew rapidly. Coupled with other developments, this movement hastened the growth of nationalism among the Baloch people. According to Breseeg, Baloch national sentiments thus acquired a new motive power and became a political force against the state of Iran. 24 In the 1960s, politically motivated Baloch made new plans for a resistance movement capable of defending Baloch national interests; 25 this gave rise to the Party of the Public of Balochestan, the Party of the Baloch, the Democratic Fighting Organization of Sistan & Balochestan, the Fadayan of the Baloch, the Balochestan Liberation Front and the National Democratic Party. These Baloch parties and fronts used the Baloch national identities such as language and culture (in the Pahlavi era) and the religion (since the Islamic Revolution of Iran) as a political tool to provoke the Baloch people against the central government of Iran. Of these, the Balochestan Liberation Front, the Fadayan of Baloch and the Party of the Public of Balochestan are considered on account of the availability of resources. The Balochestan Liberation Front emerged between the 1960s and 70s to promote Philip Carl Salzman, ‘Politics and Change among the Baloch in Iran’, Middle East Papers, 2 (2008), pp. 4–5. 24 Breseeg Taj Mohammad, Baloch Nationalism: Its Origin and Development, (Sindh, 2004), pp. 210–211. 25 Frédéric Grare, ‘Pakistan: The Resurgence of Baloch Nationalism’, Carnegie Papers, 65 (2008), p. 8. 23

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 285 anti-Iranian policies through military struggle. Since the Islamic Revolution of Iran, the Ba’ath party supported it by granting it a military base, military training, military technology and a radio station. The Front benefited from them to widely advertise and recruit new people to act against the government of Iran. The Front also widely acknowledged social and political issues of the public in Sistan & Balochestan such as poverty and unemployment. 26 The Fadayan of Baloch was formed by Amanallah Barakzaee before the Islamic Revolution of Iran. He had a hostile relation to the Pahlavi’s Kings, although he changed this approach later. Since the Islamic Revolution, Barakzaee – with the cooperation of other Baloch leaders – established the United Baloch Front and acted against the Iranian government. According to Ahmadi, the Front had a close relationship with Iranian monarchists abroad and was also funded by them. 27 According to the Zahedan Press report, the Party of the Public of Balochestan is connected to Jundallah and has supported its acts of terror and has connections with western intelligence services and spies. The party’s charter emphasizes the self-determination of the Baloch, the separation of religion and politics, and equal democratic rights between the Iranian and Baloch public. 28

OVERVIEW OF THE BALOCH RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

The development of religious discourses within the political level constitutes another significant aspect of Baloch nationalism. According to the latest statistics of the Statistical Center of Iran in 2011, Iran’s total population is 75,149,669. The population of Hamed Rodaki, ‘Balochestan Liberation Front’, Rahnama, 11 (2014), p. 118. 27 Hamid Ahmadi, ‘Baloch Leaders and Ethnic Identity’, Rashekhon Net, October 31, 2014. 28 ‘The Most Recent Document on the Connection of the Party of the Public of Balochestan with Terrorists’, Zahedan Press, September 17, 2013; Baloch United Front. ‘The proposed Charter of the Baloch United Front,’ August 2009, available at: http://www.balochunitedfront.org/ announcements/bpp_hamkari.htm, retrieved 20.11.2014. 26

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Sistan & Balochestan is 2,534,327, which is equivalent to 3.37 per cent of the total population. 29 The Sunni Baloch constitute a minority of 11–12% in Iran as a whole. 30 Prior to the coming of Islam, the Baloch were followers of Zoroaster. His religious teaching was based on upholding the supremacy of Ahura Mazda, the lord of life and wisdom, the last and first for all eternity. For Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda was considered as a creator of all and the origin of all goodness. 31 The Baloch were extremely influenced by this religion and one of its greatest centers was established in the Karkoye region of Sistan & Balochestan. 32 With the emergence of Islam in Iran, Sistan & Balochestan was not penetrated by Arab Muslims for several decades due to the poor geographical and economic situation there. The Makran area in south Sistan & Balochestan was invaded during the leadership of Usman b. Affan al-Umawi in AD 602. Several other places in Sistan & Balochestan were conquered, and Abd al-Rahman b. Samareh was appointed as the Sunni mayor there. During the leadership of Imam Ali, the first Shi‘a Imam, Samareh resigned; after the martyrdom of Imam Ali in AD 619, however, Samareh was reappointed. 33 Although there is not enough available evidence, it is suggested that the influence of the Sunni mayor in Sistan & Balochestan over many years was a decisive factor in the Baloch’s adoption of Sunni Islam. Over time, the majority of Baloch came to belong to the Hanafi School of the Sunni branch of Islam. This is one of the oldest schools of legal thought in Sunni Islam. Sharia laws and Islamic institutions thus play a very important role in Baloch The Statistics Center of Iran, The Result of the Statistics, p. 38. L. Beck, Iran’s Ethnic, p. 293. 31 S. A. Nigosian, The Zoroastrain Faith: Tradition and Modern Research, (Quebec, 1993), pp. 18–20. 32 The Office of the Islamic Advertisement of the Quom Seminary. ‘Religious Background in Sistan and Balochestan’, 2014, 1, available at: http://af.samta.ir/atlas/index.php?title=%D9%BE%DB%8C%D8%B4 %DB%8C%D9, retrieved 2.11.2014. 33 Ibid. 29 30

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 287 society. 34 Specifically, since the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, Baloch religious discourse has become politicized. Perceiving themselves as different from Iranian Shi‘a majority, the Baloch have critiqued the Shi‘a state. They view the Shi‘as as a primary cause of the hardships they have suffered and perceive themselves as subject to discrimination as a Sunni minority in a Shi‘a-led state and society. 35 In other words, they argue that religious differences have reinforced existing discriminatory practices since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. 36 Despite the differences between the Baloch with the Iranian society, they have coexisted over time. 37 Since 2003, however, the religious discourse of the Baloch, Sunni Islam, has been facing systematic destruction, leaving only the province’s most radical elements such as Jundallah (for detailed analysis see the next sections in this article) and intensifying the Shi‘a and Sunni conflict. 38 Wiig argues that the Sunni religious identity of the Baloch has been affected by radical Islamic movements that commonly emphasize that the Shi‘as are an enemy of the Sunnis, and that Shi‘as are infidels. 39 Molavi Nazir Ahmad Salami, the representative of the people in Sistan & Balochistan in the Assembly of Iranian Experts, touched upon the issue by stating that “radicalism and Salafism have become harmful to Islam. Once, radical Wahhabis were only against Islam, but now they have become against every religion in the world. It is the responsibility of religious leaders to illustrate the right way of Islam to people to secure them from radicalism and extremism.” 40 A. R. Taheri, The Baloch Post-Islamic Revolution, pp. 56–7; Titus Paul, ‘Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pushtun: Stereotypes, Social Organization and History in Western Pakistan’, Modern Asian Studies 32/3 (1998), pp. 672–984. 35 L. Beck, Iran’s Ethnic, pp. 293–294. 36 Ibid. 37 ‘Nationalist Movement in Contemporary Iran’, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Hajj Affairs, September 3, 2013. 38 F. Grane, Pakistan, p. 13. 39 P. C. Salzman, Politic and Change, p. 6. 40 Ahmad Salami, ‘Salafists and Wahhabists are Harmful to Islam’, Iranian Student’s News Agency, August 16, 2014. 34

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Although this article focuses on the influence of Salafi Wahhabism on Jundallah to examine its radical religious discourses on the political level in Iran (for detailed analysis see below), the political authorities in Iran have attributed the threat of Jundallah to the financial and logistic support of external powers, specifically the US and Israel. The organization has attempted to weaken the state of Iran. Vesely supports the narrative of the Iranian political authorities regarding the role of the US and Israel in supporting Jundallah. He argues that in May 2007, a secret directive from the Bush administration authorized the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to destabilize the eastern border of Iran and a $10 million budget was allocated for the purpose 41 of supporting Jundallah (see below). However, the contradiction in the US approach is that in a report of the Office of the Coordination for Counterterrorism in August 2011, Jundallah was listed as a terrorist organization in relation to the Section 219 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. 42 The US State Department spokesman, Philip Crowley, stated in 2010 that Jundallah would be designed a terrorist organization by the State Department due to the numerous acts of terror perpetrated by the organization which resulted in the deaths of Iranian government officials and members of the Iranian public. 43 However, the Iranian political authorities have continued to claim that Jundallah is supported by the US and Israel (see below). The narratives of Iranian authorities can be contextualized within the context of a rise in the activities of US intelligence agencies in the region since the September 11 terror attacks and the opportunities presented by a lack of centralized control of the 59F

60F

See for example, Ross Brian, Richard Esposito, ‘Bush Authorizes New Covert Action against Iran’, ABC News, May 22, 2007. 42 United States Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, ‘Joint Hearing of the House Armed Service’, February 23, 2007, available at: http://www.nctc.gov/press_room/speeches/ Transcript_HPSCI_HASC_07-25-07.pdf, retrieved 20.12.2013. 43 Philip Crowley, ‘Remark the Spokesman of the US State, at the press release of the Department of the State’, Washington D.C., November 3, 2010. 41

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 289 border regions in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 44 Iran’s Police Chief Brigadier, General Esmail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, perceived the relationship between Jundallah and the US in the following way: Washington is trying to revive the Jundallah terrorist group after the group lost most of its power due to the strong measures adopted by the Iranian police. Americans have spent a great amount of money on Rigi’s group as they feel compelled to make efforts to revive and reorganize it. 45

Under such conditions, sectarian violence has increased because of a clear expansion of operational spaces for violent sectarian groups such as Jundallah (see also below). 46 602F

JUNDALLAH IDENTITY

A fundamental turning point took place in Sistan & Balochestan since 2003, when the radical terrorist organization, Jundallah, emerged to pursue military strategies against the Iranian state. 47 No wide, systematic study has been conducted on Jundallah in either English or Persian. Nevertheless, the available sources indicate that Jundallah emerged from the Rigi tribe in Khash in the Sistan & Balochestan region. Jundallah has Baloch roots and nationalist goals, and professes radical Sunni Islam (see the analysis below). In other words, Jundallah comes from the Baloch people; however, radicalization has stepped up its activities and indicates changes in the Sunni religion of Sistan & Balochestan since 2003. Rector General of Systan & Balochestan [Name was not cited]. ‘Remark by Rector, at a conference press with Iranian journalists cited in Gerdab News Agency’, July 4, 2009; Javani Yadollah, ‘Remark by the Political Deputy of IRGC, cited in Gerdab, News Agency of IRGC’, February 20, 2008. 45 Ahmadi-Moghaddam Ismaeel. ‘Remark by the Chief Policemen of Iran in Fars News Agency, “CIA Fails to Revive Jundallah with New Terrorist Missions”’, April 16, 2012. 46 F. Grane, Pakistan, p. 18. 47 Jundallah Website [in Persian]. ‘Blog Archive’, December 19, 2010 and April 2, 2011, available at: http://jonbesh-mardom.blogspot.fi/, retrieved December 12, 2014. 44

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Regarding the identity of Jundallah, it is focused on Baloch nationalism. According to Salzman, the Iranian state has increased its influence in Sistan & Balochestan over time, often intervening in the territory. 48 This has led members of Jundallah to feel that they are held back in their own territory, and since the organization’s emergence in 2003, has brought them into violent conflict with the Iranian state and Shi‘a officials and residents in Sistan & Balochestan, intensifying the Shi‘a–Sunni conflict in the region. 49 This is in line with Jundallah’s nationalist goals that “the only way we [members of Jundallah] would support our [Baloch] rights and identity is to fight the enemy [Iran].” 50 On the Jundallah website on 18 December 2010, for example, Haj Mohammad Zaher Baloch introduced himself as the leader of the organization. He refers to the support of people in the city of Chabahar including the martyrdom of two Chabahari members of Jundallah. According to Mohammad Baloch, “the two martyrs represented how to insist against the state of Iran. This martyrdom is congratulated to the oppressed Baloch people and the Sunni community.” 51 His discussion then turns toward nationalist goals by emphasizing that in the past, the majority of the population in Chabahar was Sunni Baloch, and there was no Shi‘a population there. However, 30 per cent of the population of the city is now Shi‘a. Based on this outlook, he suggests that it is necessary to look at the oppressed situation of the Sunni Baloch in their own territory and supports them. Mohammad Baloch calls on members of Jundallah to support their nationalist symbols and become militarized to combat the Iranian security forces. He emphasizes the nationalist goals of Jundallah by stating, “the purpose of acts of terror is to expel the P. C. Salzman, Politic and Change, p. 5. Jundallah Website, April 2, 2011, available at: http://jonbeshmardom.blogspot.fi/, retrieved December 12, 2014. 50 Jundallah Website, December 18, 2010, available at: http://jon besh-mardom.blogspot.fi/, retrieved December 12, 2014. 51 Jundallah Website, December 18, 2010b, available at: http://jon besh-mardom.blogspot.fi/, retrieved December 12, 2014. 48 49

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 291 Iranian security forces and protect the rights of Baloch people.” 52 Mohammad Baloch also raises the question that when Jundallah members conduct acts of terror to defend their rights, non-Baloch people condemn them, but the increase of the Shi‘a population and the occupation of Sistan & Balochestan are not condemned. 53 He clarifies the purpose of acts of terror by referring to nationalist goals. Jundallah has also been influenced by radical religious discourses such as those of radical Salafi Sunni Wahhabism to represent its anti-Shi‘a perspective to Iran. 54 Iranian political and religious authorities argue that Iran has been surrounded by the neighboring states who perceive it as a threat. They radicalized Jundallah to destabilize the Iranian state and widen the Shi‘a–Sunni conflict within it (see for example Ayatollah Khamenei, July 20, 2009; Rector General of Systan & Balochestan, July 4, 2009). On the other hand, members of Jundallah regard their acts of terror against the Shi‘a state and society in Sistan & Balochestan as a jihad (holy war) against Shi‘a Iran. 55 There is an argument that Jundallah religious identity comes from radical Deobonadi. The Deobandi movement traces its roots on modern day Uttar Pradesh, where a group of clerics founded Dar-ol-Olume Deobandi in 1866. The movement was not radical at first, but a form of Hanafi Sunni Islamic revivalism. Until the end of the World War I, the movement was apolitical, and dealt with an inward looking at the Islamic quality of individual lives. 56 The scope of Deobandi was subsequently broadened by revivalist messages to include political and military aspects. Ibid. Ibid. 54 C. Zambelis, Political Threat, p. 2; C. Zambelis, ‘Heeding the Call for Jihad: The Sudden Resurgence of Baloch Nationalist Militancy in Iran’, Terrorism Monitor, 10/21 (2012), pp. 1–5, available at: http://www.jamestown.org/programs/tm/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news %5D=40119#.VJXZRAoPG, retrieved 14.12.2014. 55 C. Zambelis, ‘Heeding the Call’, pp. 1–5. 56 Joshua T. White, Pakistan Islamist’s Frontier: Islamic Politics and US Policy in Pakistan North-West Frontier, (Arlington, 2008), p. 29. 52 53

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Deobandi clerics formalized their political participation by joining the Assembly of Indian Cleric (JUH), a party established in 1919. Since 1940, the JUH has focused on aggressive cultural renewal and improving the conditions of Muslim minorities. In 1945, the JUH split and the pro-Muslim league faction established Jamiat Ulemae-Islam (JUI) in Pakistan, and ideologically has used traditional Islamic laws. 57 The major shift in the Deobandi movement took place following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. It highlighted a new clerical class who were more ideologically radical than their forebears. The new Deobandi was a sectarian movement, ideologically distinct and dangerous because of the creation of a vast cadre of radical veterans. As a result, Islamic militancy was empowered and veterans pursued political goals. Viewed in this way, the Afghan war, in which anti-Russian fighters were funded by radical Salafi Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, accelerated the process of radicalism among the JUI in Pakistan and put an emphasis on ethnic religious issues. 58 The Deobandi has influenced radical Salafi Wahhabism, and Jundallah has in turn been influenced by the Deobandi. Salafi Wahhabism is a sect within Sunni Islam that refers back to the earliest Muslims who, the followers believe, followed pure traditional Islamic practices. Salafi Wahhabis respect the authority of Qurʾan and Sunna (usual practices). Salafi Wahhabism, in Sedgwick’s terms, is a doctrine and politics that has capability to empower and change identities. It develops its own tough behavior codes such as the use of violence beyond international laws. 59 It opposes the Shi‘a identity of Iran, and its influence on Jundallah, has widened the Shi‘a–Sunni conflict in Sistan & Balochestan (for detailed analysis see below). To fully contextualize the connection between Salafi Wahhabis in the Deobandi movement and the Baloch in Iran, it is Ibid., p. 37. Ibid., p. 38. 59 Mark Sedgwick, ‘Introduction: Salafism, the Social, and the Global Resurgence of Religion’, Comparative Islamic Studies, 8/1–2 (2012), pp. 61– 63. 57 58

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 293 important to clarify that the Salafi Wahhabism may have a transnational ideology and that Salafi Wahhabis may fight for autonomy and independence. Salafi Wahhabis have been frequent representatives of anti-American sentiment. However, this article is only concerned with their extremist perspective in terms of its influence on the Baloch in Iran; other aspects are excluded from this article. One of the most important Salafi Wahhabi ulama in the 1980s was Abdul-‘Aziz ibn ‘Abdullah ibn Baz, who presented numerous fatwa (judicial opinions) that demonstrated anti-Shi‘a sentiment. The portal of the General Presidency of Scholarly Research and ‘Ifta (issuing religious statements) of Saudi Arabia ensure the wide circulation of his fatwas. In a lecture on the fundamentals of Islam, Ibn Baz touches upon Shi‘a by referring to the succession issue after the death of Prophet Mohammad. He states that “we [Salafi Wahhabis] contradict you [Shi‘as] in your claim on the Prophet’s precedence. Our dispute with Shi‘a is that Shi‘a went far away from the righteous path of Islam.” 60 The fatwas of the Permanent Committee and the Grand Mufti of Ifta go beyond Ibn Baz’s soft fatwa by arguing that “Shi‘a beliefs are shirks [disbelief]. They advance these ideas in the guise of Islam merely in order to confuse the masses. The ideas they propagate are not different from those held by disbelieving nations.” 61 Sheikh Abdalla bin Jebrin, Member of the Council of Grand Ulama at the General Chairmanship for Scientific Research and Ifta, directly

Abdul-Aziz Baz, ‘A Lecture on Fundamental Islam’, 1978, p. 15, available at: http://alifta.com/Search/ResultDetails.aspx?languagename= en&lang=en&view=result, retrieved 20.11.2014. 61 The Fatwas of the Permanent Committee, ‘Categories of Those Who Violate the Testimony, Mohammad Is the Messenger of God’, p. 746, available at: http://alifta.com/Search/ResultDetails.aspx?language name=en&lang=en&view=result, retrieved 21.12.2014. The Grand Mufti of Ifta [date not cited], 92, available at: http://alifta.com/Search/ ResultDetails.aspx?languagename=en&lang=en&view=result, retrieved 12.12.2014. 60

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issued a fatwa permitting “the killing of Shiites, disrespecting them and spitting at their faces.” 62 These fatwas make clear that Shi‘as are considered as infidels, and such fatwas have been taught in Deobandi centers. Jundallah, which has been influenced by these fatwas, has conducted acts of terror against Shi‘as in Iran. The shift in the Deobandi toward radicalism clarifies Wiig’s argument that members of Jundallah were trained in Pakistan. According to Wiig, it is not surprising that radical religious changes in Sistan & Balochestan follow those in the neighboring state. Such beliefs are in opposition to Shi‘a Iranian identity, and have fueled a bloody conflict between Shi‘a and Sunni there since 2003. This sectarian conflict has affected the socio-political sphere in Iran. 63 The radical Sunni identity prompted by Jundallah threatens Iran on two fronts: nationalism and religion. In this sense, Jundallah holds a sense of nationalism that is distinct from that of the Iranian majority nation. 64 This raises the question of why Jundallah is pursuing this religious–nationalist goal. The analysis below is intended to clarify the issue.

JUNDALLAH’S TARGETS

As discussed above, Jundallah holds a Baloch and radical religious identity. Its real and final targets vary from protecting the independence of Baloch and Baloch nationalism, supporting their socio–economic and religious rights vis-à-vis the Persians, and the overthrow of the Shi‘a state of Iran. 65 For example, in news on April 12, 2011, members of Jundallah acknowledged that “we strongly stand against the state of Iran and do not ignore any Dietmar Muehlboeck, ‘A Top Saudi Cleric Declares Shi‘ates to be Infidels, Calls on Sunnis to Drive Them out’, January 22, 2007, available at: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg35080 .html, retrieved 23.12.2014. 63 Audun Kolstad Wiig, ‘Islamist Opposition in the Islamic Republic: Jundullah and the Spread of Extremist Deobandism in Iran’, (FFI, 2009), pp. 19–20. 64 Ibid. 65 Jundallah Website, April 2, 2011, available at: http://jonbeshmardom.blogspot.fi/, retrieved December 12, 2014. 62

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 295 attempt to overthrow the state.” 66 Of these, the two most important goals of Jundallah, independence and widening the Shi‘a and Sunni conflict within Iran, are discussed in detail below. Independence The Baloch including Jundallah claim that Iranian officials and security forces have increased their presence in Sistan & Balochestan, particularly since the emergence of Jundallah in 2003 (Ibid.). In addition to this, the geographical proximity between Jundallah and the Baloch of Pakistan has provided a platform for the Baloch in Iran to publicize their independence from that state. Regarding the presence of Iranian security forces in Sistan & Balochestan, it should be noted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has increased security there in response to the increased threat from Jundallah. The Major General of the IRGC, Mohammad Ali Ja’fari, in a conference on the security of the southern part of Iran and Sistan & Balochestan to members of IRGC and representatives of the state, asserted that “the IRGC has committed to confronting and fighting terrorist groups such as Jundallah in the eastern border. This region, which has historically been insecure, was firstly assigned to the IRGC in 1983–1984. The IRGC had a short-term commitment there to reduce insecurity at the border and to disarm the terrorists.” 67 Ja’fari articulated the responsibility of the IRGC as the following: After finalizing the commitment of IRGC in the eastern border and Sistan & Balochestan, there have been numerous threats in the region since 2004. Since 2006–2007, security along the eastern border and the responsibility to confront Jundallah has been re-assigned to the IRGC. However, this time, we have a long-term commitment to combat Jundallah and reestablish a positive security situation there. 68

Ibid. Ja’fari Mohammadali, ‘Statement by the Major General of IRGC in a conference on the Security of Sistan & Balochestan’, Zahedan Press, May 26, 2009. 68 Ibid. 66 67

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Jundallah regards the presence of the IRGC in Sistan & Balochestan is a threat to the Baloch territory, and has intensified its claim to independence in response. Regarding linkages between the Baloch of Iran and Jundallah, Pakistan, and efforts to achieve independence, Zambelis has argued that independence has been one of the targets of the Baloch over time. The desire of the Baloch of Iran and Jundallah for independence is part of a larger Baloch project to establish a Greater Balochestan in Pakistan and Afghanistan. 69 Since the establishment of the state of Pakistan, a desire for independence from it has led to a number of conflicts between the Baloch and the central government: in 1948, 1958–1959, 1963– 1969, 1973–77 and from 2004 to the present. In a 2014 communiqué, Pakistani Baloch leaders demanded independence from the so-called tyrannical government and the withdrawal of Pakistani troops from Balochestan. They accuse the Pakistani armed forces of ethnic cleansing, and kidnapping, imprisoning and murdering Baloch activists. The Baloch of Iran and Jundallah have also sought the same goals, namely the withdrawal of Iranian security forces from Sistan & Balochestan. 70 However, the Iranian Baloch including Jundallah have not pursued a systematic process towards independence over time. Jundallah, for example, have sometimes declared that they are not seeking independence from Iran, but only to defend their rights vis-à-vis the Shi‘a majority. They recently stated that their aim was a federal state, 71 and their website does not publicly demand full independence, although they have widely acknowledged the Shi‘a Chris Zambelis, ‘Violence and Rebellion in Iranian Balochistan’, Terrorism Monitor, 4/13 (2006), available at: http://www.jamestown.org/ single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Bswords%5D=8fd58939, retrieved 12.15.2014. 70 ‘Baloch Leaders Seek Independence from Pakistan’, Business Standard, August 26, 2014, available at: http://www.business-standard. com/article/news-ians/baloch-leaders-seekindependence-from-pakistan114082600762_1.html, retrieved 23.12.2014. 71 cf. ‘We Are Demanding’, Al-Arabiya, October 23, 2014. 69

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 297 and Sunni conflict in Iran. 72 It is important to note that although their declared aims and discursive themes on independence contradict each other, they have sought to establish a Greater Balochestan by conducting acts of terror to achieve their nationalist goals by raising the Shi‘a and Sunni conflict. This has been prioritized since 2003 and the emergence of Jundallah (see also the analysis below). Widening the Shi‘a–Sunni Conflict March 2004 saw the emergence of Jundallah acts of terror in the Tasoki region, located between the cities of Sistan & Balochestan, and Zabol. Referring to only the Iranian narratives of the threat, the analysis below examines the situation in relation to the radical religious and nationalist goals of Jundallah against the Iranian Shi‘as living in Sistan & Balochestan. Numerous Iranian political authorities have sought to address the threat of Jundallah on a number of occasions since 2004. Mohammad Khazaee, the former representative of Iran in the United Nations (UN), addressed it in his 2008 speech at the UN Security Council meeting. Khazaee characterized Jundallah as a terrorist organization which posed a threat to the Iranian state and society: Jundallah is an existential threat to Iran. Iran fights Jundallah in accordance with UN Resolution 1267 and other resolutions which target terrorists and extremist groups. Iran needs the support of international community and the UN functions a key role in this regard. Iran is also negotiating with neighboring states to improve security on the eastern borders. However, powerful countries have supported terrorists such as Jundallah in order to press and weaken states [such as Iran] which have opposite perspectives to them. 73

Officially sanctioned Iranian news agencies such as Fars, Tabnak, and Gerdab, the newsletter of the Revolution Guard Cyber

Jundallah Website, \ various news, available at: http://jonbeshmardom.blogspot.fi/, retrieved December 12, 2014. 73 Mohammad Khazaee, ‘Remark by the Representative of Iran at UN’, Cited in Tabnak. 11 December, 2008. 72

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Defense Command (RCDC), have unambiguously presented Jundallah as a terrorist group which has used multiple strategies to attack the Iranian state and Shi‘as living in Sistan & Balochestan. 74 For example, Reza Lakzaee, a Shi‘a seminarian of the Quom Seminary, who was kidnapped by Jundallah in the Tasoki attack referred to “the statements of the former leader of Jundallah, Abdol Malik Rigi that Shi‘as must leave Sistan & Balochestan.” 75 Ayatollah Hossein Vahid Khorasani, an Iranian Shi‘a Marja, condemned acts of terror and kidnapping strategies by Jundallah in Tasoki, emphasizing the role of Iranian security forces and the “necessity of public security.” 76 Suicide bombings, ambushes, kidnappings and targeted assassinations are among the more notable of Jundallah’s strategies (see for example Tabnak and Fars News Agency between 2004 and 2011). 77 The Global Terrorism Database (GTD) at the Center of Excellence of the US Department of Homeland Security provides statistics regarding the number of incidents, injuries, and targets of terror perpetrated by Jundallah between 2006 and 2010. According to the GTD, ten of the acts of terror by Jundallah targeted general members of the government, policemen, the Iranian military forces and private citizens and property. 78 By contrast, Iranian news and news agencies have reported 20 acts of terror of Jundallah in the same period. 79 The reason for disparity between sources is unclear, although one can speculate that the GTD has underestimated the number of attacks for political reasons. The opposite may also be 634F

635F

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William M. Habeeb, The Middle East in Turmoil: Conflict, Revolutions and Change, (Santa Barbara, 2012), p. 46. 75 Reza Lakzaee, ‘He Said Shias Must Leave’, February 24, 2009. 76 Hossein Vahid Khorasani, ‘Remark by the Shia Marja of Iran, in a meeting with several seminarians, Quom’, 28 April, 2005. 77 For a Western source, see United States Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. 78 Global Terrorist Database, ‘Incidents over Time’, 2010, available at: http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?page=1& casualties_type=b&, retrieved 23.1.2014. 79 ‘New Acts of Terror of Jundallah in Zahedan’, Mardomsalari [Democracy], July 15, 2011. 74

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 299 true: the Iranian state may have overstated the frequency of attacks to further legitimize its responses. For purposes of space, only those acts of terror perpetrated by Jundallah which received widespread publicity in Iran and abroad are examined below. In 2004, members of Jundallah attacked passing cars between Zabol and Zahedan, killing 22 Shi‘a Iranians and injuring many others, including a number of city officials of Zahedan. 80 In 2005, members of Jundallah bombed a bus in Zahedan carrying members of IRGC. 13 IRGC members were killed and 30 were injured. In 2006, 11 members of the IRGC and 9 members of Jundallah were injured in an IRGC attack on the group. 81 The IRGC have also attributed the 2006 death of its member, Ali Shahriyari to Jundallah. Abbasali Soleimani, the representative of the Supreme Leader of Iran in Sistan & Balochestan, stated in a public address that “[Shahriyari’s] death would harden Iranian resolve to resist Jundallah efforts to undermine the country.” 82 In 2007, members of Jundallah attacked an army checkpoint in Saravan and kidnapped 16 Shi‘a army officials. 83 The Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Society of Qom Seminary Teachers and a religious and political authority, Mohammad Yazdi condemned this act of terror: “The enemies of Iran support Jundallah to widen the Shi‘a and Sunni conflict and sow dissent.” 84 Such statements indicate an acceptance of the notion that Jundallah is a threat to the Shi‘a majority. Aftab News, ‘Was Ministry of Intelligence Successful in Tasoki Attack?’, April 10, 2007. 81 Syasat Roz [Policy of Day], ‘You Must Leave on Bandar Abbas Airport’, February 22, 2013. 82 Soleimani Abbasali, ‘Remark by the Representative of the Supreme Leader of Iran, at the funeral of Alireza Shahriyari’, December 9, 2006. 83 ‘Heal the Wounds of the Nation by Air Force Act Against Jundallah’, Ettela’at, February 26, 2013. 84 Mohammad Yazdi, ‘The Message of Qom Seminary Regarding the Act of Terror in Iranshahr’, November 17, 2007. 80

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In 2008 Jundallah attacked a gathering celebrating the anniversary of martyrdom of Imam Hossain, the third Shi‘a Imam, in Chabahar. While Tabnak reported that 28 to 50 general Shi‘a public were killed or injured in the attack, 85 Gerdab reported that 37 Shi‘as were killed and 80 injured. 86 The exact number of casualties is not known. In aftermath of the incident, 9 members of Jundallah were arrested and a delegation consisted of the representatives of the Supreme Leader and President of Iran, and several other officials traveled to Chabahar to show solidarity with the Shi‘a victim’s families and attend funeral. In another incident, Heshmatollah Attarzadeh Niaki, an Iranian diplomat in Pakistan, disappeared on 18 November 2008. Heidar Moslehi, the former Minister of Intelligence, attributed the disappearance to Jundallah. 87 Addressing the Iranian public, a city official in Sistan & Balochestan stated that “Jundallah wants to destabilize the Shi‘a Iranian state and society.” 88 In another incident in 2009, 27 Shi‘as were killed and 306 injured in the Amir al-Momenin Great Mosque of Zahedan. 89 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran and the highest religious and political figure, condemned the acts of terror perpetrated by Jundallah in Zahedan. He stated that “it is a crime against the Shi‘a people who gather in the mosque to worship Allah. This bloody event was planned by external enemies to 64F

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‘Accuser of Chabahar Explosion Were Signified’, Tabnak, News Agency of IRGC, 15 December, 2010. 86 ‘The Number of Dead People in Relation to Acts of Terror of ChaBahar Increased to 37 People’, Gerdab News Agency. 87 Embassy of Iran in Pakistan, ‘Recovery of Mr. Heshmatollah Attarzadeh Niaki’, March 30, 2014, available at: http://www.iran embassy.pk/en/press-section/524-recovery-of-mr-heshmatollahattarzadeh-niaki.html, retrieved 3.4. 2014. 88 Rector General of Systan & Balochestan, Remark. 89 ‘Arresting Seven Suspected and Two Accused People of in Charge of Explosion in Great Mosque of Zahedan’, Ettela’at, December 2, 2011. 85

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 301 encourage a conflict between Shi‘as and Sunnis in Iran.” 90 Ayatollah Khamenei was specifically making reference to the conflict between the Shi‘a majority and Sunnis in Iran. He was clearly emphasizing the religious aspect of the Jundallah threat. Ali Abdollahi, the deputy of the Minister of Interior, stated that “the acts of terror in Amir al-Momenin mosque in 2009 were conducted by Jundallah and that several members were arrested.” 91 The attack was condemned in a joint statement by the Bait ol-Moghaddas [the Holy House of Quds] arm of IRGC in the city of Kurdestan and Basij students of the universities of the city of Damghan: “Jundallah may seek to foment a conflict between Shi‘a and Sunni within Iran but the killing of innocent people of Zahedan is a crime that the nation of Iran as a whole does not forgive; Jundallah must be fought.” 92 The statement sought to portray Jundallah as a threat to the Shi‘a public, particularly in Sistan & Balochestan. In 2009, Noor Ali Shooshtari, the Deputy Commander of the IRGC in Sistan & Balochestan, was also killed in an apparent suicide bombing, along with four senior members of the of the Revolutionary Guard and thirty-seven others. 93 Ala’eddin Borojerdi, the head of National Security Commission of the Parliament, has stated that Shooshtari has been engaged with Baloch tribal leaders to establish a sustainable security in the city of

Sayed Ali Khamenei, ‘Message by the Supreme Leader of Iran, regarding the assassination of a group of Shia people in Zahedan, Tehran’, July 20, 2009. 91 Ali Abdollahi, ‘Remark by former Deputy of the Secretary of the State’, cited by Gerdab News Agency, 23 July, 2009. 92 ‘Declaration of Baitol Moghadas IRGC of Kurdestan’, Sepah News, 21 July, 2009; ‘Declaration of Basiji Students of the Universities of Damghan’, Sepah News, 20 July, 2009. 93 The Office of Representative of the Supreme Leader in Boshehr, ‘Biography of Noor Ali Shooshtari’, May 19, 2013, available at: http://dbsonnat.ir/11-announcements/1085-1392-02-30-10-19-26.html, retrieved 20.9.2014. 90

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Sistan & Balochestan. Jundallah sought to undermine these efforts. 94 Mohammad Khakpour, the Major General of the Army of the IRGC stated in a press conference that “the martyrdom of Shooshtari and several Baloch leaders is a symbol of Shi‘a and Sunni unity in Iran. The attack will not go without response.” 95 Ayatollah Makareme Shirazi, the Iranian Shi‘a Marja, also condemned the Zahedan attack. The statement once again emphasizes sectarian nature of the conflict, although Jundallah is presented as a threat to the peaceful status quo which exists between Shi‘a and Sunni Iranians. 96 While not an exhaustive account, the above attacks represent the most significant acts of terror perpetrated by Jundallah. In light of the number of terrorist acts perpetrated by Jundallah between 2004 and 2009, and the nature of statements issued by religious and political authorities, it seems clear that such statements contributed to the threat of Jundallah to the Iranian state, its officials and Shi‘a Iranians living in Sistan & Balochestan. As a result, Jundallah, with its specific radical identity and related threats, has not been accommodated within Iran.

CONCLUSION

This article explored the way in which Jundallah, with a radical Sunni identity and nationalist goals, has widened the Shi‘a−Sunni conflict within Iran by conducting acts of terror against Shi‘a Iran. Two factors in relation to the Baloch in Iran provided the context for Jundallah. First, the Baloch view themselves as an oppressed minority who have not received an equitable share of Iranian economic resources over time. In the Pahlavi era, the Persian Ala’eddin Borojerdi, ‘Remark by the Head of National Security Commission of the Parliament of Iran’, cited by Persian Al Arabiya, November 2, 2010. 95 Mohammad Khakpour, ‘Remark by the Major General of the Army Corps in a Conference Press’, Qom Seminary News, October 18, 2009. 96 Naser Makarem Shirazee, ‘Remark by the Shia Marj’a of Iran’, cited in Qom Seminary News, October 18, 2009. 94

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 303 language and culture played a dominant role and the Baloch were marginalized from mainstream Iranian society. Since the Islamic Revolution, the Baloch have also found themselves discriminated against on the basis of their Sunni identity, and they claim that this has reinforced their poor socio-economic situation and high rate of unemployment. Since its emergence in 2003, Jundallah has pursued Baloch nationalist goals and sought to protect the rights of the Baloch people. Its increasing radicalism and anti-Shi‘a views have also led it to step up its acts of terror. In 2004, for example, members of Jundallah attacked passing cars in Zabol and Zahedan. In 2005 and 2006, they attacked twenty-four members of the IRGC by bombing their cars. In 2007, sixteen Shi‘a officials in the Saravan checkpoint were kidnapped. In 2008 and 2009, numerous Shi‘a people were killed and injured in acts of terror in the Ashura event and the Amir al-Momenin Mosque in Zahedan. The analysis finds that the religious differences that separate the radical Jundallah from Iran’s Shi‘a majority have reinforced sectarian conflict in the country. Speeches by Ayatollahs Khamenei, Makarem Shirazi and Vahid Khorasani, the three highest Shi‘a Marjas in Iran, have all emphasized the sectarian dimensions of the Jundallah threat. This line has been emphasized by Ayatollah Vahid Khorasani and Makarem Shirazi, who have specifically condemned acts of terror committed by Jundallah against Shi‘as in Sistan & Balochestan. More importantly, the analysis finds that Jundallah originates from the Baloch in Sistan & Balochestan and has nationalist goals. Jundallah has developed its radical Sunni identity vis-à-vis the Shi‘a majority in Iran, interpreting Islamic messages in a way that depicts Shi‘as as an enemy that must be combated. Viewed in this way, Jundallah’s radical religious nationalism in Sistan & Balochestan has been connected to violence and its exclusion from the Iranian majority society. The wider implication of the analysis could be the risk of the emergence of a radical perspective of Islam by Jundallah, although Islam itself proposes peace and integration. This is no longer an expression of Islam but a narrow radical form of religious nationalism in Sistan & Balochestan.

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Ali Abdollahi, ‘Remark by the former Deputy of the Secretary of the State, at a discussion with Islamic Republic News Agency cited by Gerdab News Agency’, 23 July, 2009. Al-Arabiya, ‘We Are Demanding the Federal System and the Rights of Baloch People’, October 23, 2014. Iraj Afshar Sistani, Introduction to Recognize Tribes, Nomadic and Nomadic Tribes in Iran, (Tehran, 1988). Aftab News Agency, ‘Was Ministry of Intelligence Successful in Tasoki Attack?’, April 10, 2007. Hamid Ahmadi, ‘Baloch Leaders and Ethnic Identity’, Rashekhon Net, October 31, 2014. Ismaeel Ahmadi-Moghaddam, ‘Remark by the Chief Policemen of Iran in Fars News Agency, “CIA Fails to Revive Jundallah with New Terrorist Missions”’, April 16, 2012. Business Standard, ‘Baloch Leaders Seek Independence from Pakistan’, August 26, 2014, available at: http://www.business-standard.com/article/newsians/baloch-leaders-seekindependence-from-pakistan114082600762_1.html, retrieved 23.12.2014. Baloch United Front, ‘The proposed Charter of the Baloch United Front’, August 2009, available at: http://www.balochunitedfront.org/announcements/bpp_ha mkari.htm, retrieved 20.11.2014. Abdul-Aziz Baz, ‘A Lecture on Fundamental Islam’, 1978, available at: http://alifta.com/Search/ResultDetails.aspx?languagename=e n&lang=en&view=result, retrieved 20.11.2014. Lois Beck, ‘Iran’s Ethnic, Religious, and Tribal Minorities’, in Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, Ed. Lawrence Potter, (London, 2013). Ala’eddin Borojerdi, ‘Remark by the Head of National Security Commission of the Parliament of Iran, cited by Al Arabiya Persian’, November 2, 2010. Taj Mohammad Breseeg, Baloch Nationalism: Its Origin and Development, (Sindh, 2004), available at: https://balochwriters.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/balochna

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 305 tionalismitsoriginanddevelopment.pdf, retrieved 12.8.2014. Philip Crowley, ‘Remark by the Spokesman of the US State, at the press release of the Department of the State’, (Washington D.C., November 3, 2010). Naseer Dashti, The Baloch and Balochestan: A Historical Account from the Beginning to the Fall of the Baloch State, (Bloomington, 2012). Embassy of Iran in Pakistan. ‘Recovery of Mr. Heshmatollah Attarzadeh Niaki’, March 30, 2014, available at: http://www.iranembassy.pk/en/press-section/524-recoveryof-mr-heshmatollah-attarzadeh-niaki.html, retrieved 3.4. 2014. Ettela’at, ‘Arresting Seven Suspected and Two Accused People of in Charge of Explosion in Great Mosque of Zahedan’, December 2, 2011. ———, ‘Heal the Wounds of the Nation by Air Force Act Against Jundallah’, February 26, 2013. Gerdab, ‘The Number of Dead People in Relation to Acts of Terror of Chabahar Increased to 37 People’, December 12, 2009. Global Terrorist Database, ‘Incidents over Time’, (2010), available at: http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?page=1 &casualties_type=b&, retrieved 23.1.2014. Frédéric Grare, ‘Pakistan: The Resurgence of Baloch Nationalism’, Carnegie Papers, 65 (2008). William M. Habeeb, The Middle East in Turmoil: Conflict, Revolutions and Change, (Santa Barbara, 2012). Ehsan Hooshmand, ‘Discussion with Dr. Hamid Ahmadi: Iranian Tribes and the Story of Common National Identity’, Iran, April 13, 2014. Mohammadali Ja’fari, ‘Statement by the Major General of IRGC in a conference on the Security of the Southern Part of Iran and Sistan & Balochestan’, Zahedan Press, May 26, 2009. Yadollah Javani, ‘Remark by Yadollah Javani, Political Deputy of IRGC’, cited in Gerdab News Agency, February 20, 2008. Jundallah Website, ‘Blog Archive’, 2011 and 2010, available at: http://jonbesh-mardom.blogspot.fi/, retrieved December 12, 2014.

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Bijan Khajehpour, ‘Sistan−Baluchestan: Rouhani’s Challenge’, AlMonitor, July 17, 2014, available at: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/04/ rouhani-sistan-baluchistan-impossible-mission-1.html, retrieved 21.9.2014. Mohammad Khakpour, ‘Remark by the Major General of the Army Corps in a Conference Press’, Qom Seminary News, October 18, 2009. Sayed Ali Khamenei, ‘Message by Ayatollah Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, regarding the assassination of a group of Shia people in Zahedan by Jundallah’, Tehran, July 20, 2009. Mohammad Khazaee. ‘Remark by the Representative of Iran at UN.” Cited in Tabnak, News Agency.’ 11 December, 2008. Reza Lakzaee, ‘He Said Shias Must Leave’, February 24, 2009, available at: http://www.tasooki.com/index.php?option=com_content&t ask=view&id=466&Itemid=34, retrieved 2.9.204. Naser Makarem Shirazee, ‘Remark by the Shia Marja of Iran’, cited in Quom Seminary News cited from Hamshahri, October 18, 2009. Dietmar Muehlboeck, ‘A Top Saudi Cleric Declares Shi‘ates to be Infidels, Calls on Sunnis to Drive Them out’, January 22, 2007, available at: https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ msg35080.html, retrieved 23.12.2014. ‘Nationalist Movement in Contemporary Iran’, Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Hajj Affairs. September 3, 2013. ‘New Acts of Terror of Jundallah in Zahedan’, Mardomsalari [Democracy], July 15, 2011. S. A. Nigosian, The Zoroastrain Faith: Tradition and Modern Research, (Quebec, 1993). Abbasali Nora, ‘Unemploment Leads People in Sistan and Balochestan to Smuggling, Iran Economy Online’, May 4, 2013, available at: http://www.eghtesadeiranonline.com/vdcaumn6649nia1.k5k 4.html, retrieved 10.9.2014. J. E. Peterson, ‘The Baloch Presence in the Persian Gulf’, in

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 307 Sectarian Politics in the Persian Gulf, Ed. Lawrence Potter (London, 2013). Rector General of Systan & Balochestan [Name was not cited]. ‘Remark by the Rector, at a conference press with Iranian journalists’, cited in Gerdab, News Agency.’ July 4, 2009. Hamed Rodaki, ‘Balochestan Liberation Front’, Rahnama, 11 (2014). Brian Ross, Richard Esposito, ‘Bush Authorizes New Covert Action against Iran’, ABC News, May 22, 2007. Ahmad Salami, ‘Salafists and Wahhabists are Harmful to Islam’, Iranian Student’s News Agency, August 16, 2014. Yeganeh Salehi, ‘On the Road with Hassan Rouhani’, The National, April 15, 2014. Philip Carl Salzman, “Politics and Change among the Baloch in Iran”, Middle East Papers, 2 (2008). Eliz Sanasarian, Religious Minorities in Iran, (Cambridge, 2004). Mark Sedgwick, ‘Introduction: Salafism, the Social, and the Global Resurgence of Religion’, Comparative Islamic Studies, 8/1–2 (2012). Sepah [IRGC] News, ‘Declaration of Basiji Students of the Universities of Damghan’, 20 July, 2009. ———, ‘Declaration of Baitol Moghadas IRGC of Kurdestan’, 21 July, 2009. Akhtar Husain Siddiqi, Baluchistan (Pakistan): Its Society Resources, and Development, (Lanham, 1991). Abbasali Soleimani, ‘Remark by the Representative of the Supreme Leader of Iran, at the funeral of Alireza Shahriyari’, cited in the Sepah News, December 9, 2006. Syasat Roz [Policy of Day], ‘You Must Leave on Bandar Abbas Airport’, February 22, 2013. Tabnak, ‘Accuser of Chabahar Explosion Were Signified’, 15 December, 2010. Ahmad Reza Taheri, The Baloch Post-Islamic Revolution: A Political Study, (Pune, 2009), available at: http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/handle/10603/3809?mode =full&submit_simple=Show+full+item+record, retrieved

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12.11.2014. The Fatwas of the Permanent Committee, ‘Categories of Those Who Violate the Testimony, Mohammad Is the Messenger of God’, [date not cited], available at: http://alifta.com/Search/ResultDetails.aspx?languagename=e n&lang=en&view=result, retrieved 21.12.2014. The Grand Mufti of Ifta, ‘Major Shirk’ [date not cited], available at: http://alifta.com/Search/ResultDetails.aspx?languagename=e n&lang=en&view=result, retrieved 12.12.2014. The Office of Representative of the Supreme Leader in Boshehr, ‘Biography of Noor Ali Shooshtari’, May 19, 2013, available at: http://dbsonnat.ir/11-announcements/1085-1392-02-30-1019-26.html, retrieved 20.9.2014. The Office of the Islamic Advertisement of the Quom Seminary, ‘Religious Background in Sistan and Balochestan’, 2014, available at: http://af.samta.ir/atlas/index.php?title=%D9%BE%DB%8C %D8%B4%DB%8C%D9, retrieved 2.11.2014. The Statistics Center of Iran, ‘The Result of the Statistics of Population in Iran in 2011’, 2011, available at: http://www.amar.org.ir/Portals/0/sarshomari90/n_sarshom ari90_2.pdf, retrieved 20.8. 2014. The Statistics Center of Iran, ‘Sistan & Baluchestan’, 2012, available at: https://www.amar.org.ir/Default.aspx?tabid=1217, retrieved 20.8. 2014. Paul Titus, ‘Honor the Baloch, Buy the Pushtun: Stereotypes, Social Organization and History in Western Pakistan’, Modern Asian Studies, 32/3 (1998). United States Department of State, Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism, ‘Joint Hearing of the House Armed Service and the House Select Committee on Intelligence Subject’, February 23, 2007, available at: http://www.nctc.gov/press_room/speeches/Transcript_HPS CI_HASC_07-25-07.pdf, retrieved 20.12.2013. United Sates Energy Information Administration, ‘US FOB Costs of Persian Gulf Countries Crude Oil’, January 12, 2014,

10. JUNDALLAH AND RADICAL RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM 309 available at: http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PE T&s=I040000004&f=M. retrieved 12.10.2014. UNPO, ‘West Balochestan’, 2010, available at: http://unpo.org/images/member_profile/westbalochistanpro filepublisherjune%202010.pdf, retrieved 20.11.2014. Hossein Vahid Khorasani, ‘Remark by Ayatollah Vahid Khorasani, Shia Marja of Iran, in a meeting with several seminarians’, Quom, 28 April, 2005. Joshua T. White, ‘Pakistan Islamist’s Frontier: Islamic Politics and US Policy in Pakistan North-West Frontier’, (Virginia, 2008). Audun Kolstad Wiig, ‘Islamist Opposition in the Islamic Republic: Jundullah and the Spread of Extremist Deobandism in Iran’, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI), (2009). Mohammad Yazdi, ‘The Message of Qom Seminary Regarding the Act of Terror in Iranshahr’, November 17, 2007. Zahedan Press, ‘The Most Recent Document on the Connection of the Party of the Public of Balochestan with Terrorists’, September 17, 2013. Zambelis, Chris, ‘Violence and Rebellion in Iranian Balochistan’, Terrorism Monitor, 4/13 (2006), available at: http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews %5Bswords%5D=8fd58939, retrieved 12.15.2014. ———, ‘Political Threat or Counterterrorism: Assessing Iran’s Capture of Jundallah Leader Abdelmalek Rigi’, Terrorism Monitor, 8/13 (2010), available at: http://www.jamestown.org/programs/tm/single/?tx_ttnews %5Btt_news%5D=36230&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=26& cHash=2c7eae88e7#.VJXagAoPG, retrieved 16.12.2014. ———, ‘Heeding the Call for Jihad: The Sudden Resurgence of Baloch Nationalist Militancy in Iran’, Terrorism Monitor, 10/21 (2012), available at: http://www.jamestown.org/programs/tm/single/?tx_ttnews %5Btt_news%5D=40119#.VJXZRAoPG, retrieved 14.12.2014.

11. NATIONALISM AND ISLAMISM AS OPPOSING DETERMINANTS OF IRANIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY ALAM SALEH ∗ “A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours”. 1 Ernest Renan

INTRODUCTION

Identity is not merely about what one is, but also about what one is not. Identity is oppositional, and requires an other who is not only perceived as different but also as inferior, hostile, and threatening. Thus, the dichotomy of us versus them is an omnipresent aspect of identity politics. Identity, be it national, ethnic or religious, has always been utilized to construct a coherent sense of togetherness among people of different ethno-religious backgrounds within a specific territorial entity. The process of national identity formation, led and sponsored by states, often employs peaceful methods, through such means as education, and mass media communications. Yet, at times, it also takes place through coercive Dr. Alam Saleh is a lecturer in Middle Eastern Politics at the Institute of Arab & Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, UK. 1 Quoted from Avi Shlaim, ‘A Betrayal of History’, The Guardian, 22/02/2002. Accessed on 16/01/2015. http://www.guardian.co.uk/ israel/Story/0,2763,654054,00.html. ∗

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means, including strict assimilationist policies, and/or social engineering through the eradication of ‘undesirable’ identities. These mechanisms are particularly important in non-western political contexts where new concepts have been recently introduced. Western terms and conceptions such as the nationstate, national identity, territorial integrity, secularism, and modernity are imported products in non-western contexts, and can rely on very little, if any, common socio-historical understanding or background in such places. Therefore, these newly imported concepts have been employed by recently established states out of their political, socio-cultural, demographic and economic context. This has often led to the creation of states before nations, boundaries before countries, and ideologies before identities. Since the advent of the twentieth century, nationalism and religion have been employed as two strong instruments of national identity building in the Middle East designed to cohere fragmented, diverse and transnational ethno-religious identities. Therefore, at their conception, these states and their boundaries barely represented the heterogeneous mix of people located within them. Therefore, incoherence in national identity has become a crucial national security concern for many states in the Middle East. These states and their officials have frequently resorted to state-led nationalism and/or ideological religions in order to impose cohesion and homogeneity in their reified national identity. The construction and reconstruction of Iranian national identity has been a process that has been characterised by increasing complexity since the establishment of a modern nationstate in 1925. The case of Iran, perhaps, has been more complicated than that of many other states, and this complexity can be accounted for by two major factors: Iran has struggled in adopting nationalism as a distinctly multi-ethnic country; meanwhile, it has also faced several difficulties in using Islamism as a Shi‘a ideology, in the same way as its radical Sunni counterparts in the region. Since the Safavid era, three centuries ago, the Iranian state has attempted to establish and legitimise itself as being embodied by a distinct Shi‘a identity through the on-going centralization and institutionalisation of Shiism in marked opposition to its regional

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others, in particular the Sunni Ottoman Turks and the Arabs. 2 Since then, Shiism, rather than Islamism, has become a core source of religious identity for Iranians. Moreover, many Iranian ethnic minority groups have not welcomed the nationalist policies that presupposed Persianism during the Pahlavi era. The five major ethnic minority groups in Iran are the Azeris, the Kurds, the Arabs, the Baluchis, and the Turkmens, and taken together these minorities account for almost half of the population. All of these groups are sizable, transnational, territorially located, and have had a long history of presenting ethno-political demands and perceived threats to Iranian hegemony and territorial integrity. 3 Tehran has adopted nationalism and Islamism in a contradictory, at times effective, and always conceptually confused effort to redress its national identity ‘problems’ and unify and reify the Iranian self. The Pahlavis used and appealed to Persian nationalism to this end, placing particular emphasis on the glory of the ancient Iranian monarchy, and on the mythological properties of Persianism and Aryanism. The transformation of Iranian societal identity from a nationalist one to an Islamist one has led to a politically rife and conceptually significant confrontation between these two opposed ideologies of identity. This chapter focuses on the national and religious tensions in Iranian identity, which arise in great part from this confrontation, and investigates the evident discrepancies between them as a potential challenge to the state’s ideological power and its hegemonic hold on national identity in Iran.

A. R. Sheikholesalmi, ‘From Religious Accommodation to Religious Revolution: the transformation of Shiism in Iran’, in The States, Religion and Ethnic Politics: Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, Eds. A. Banuaziz, M. Wiener, (Syracuse, 1986), pp. 227–256. 3 Alam Saleh, Ethnic Identity and the State in Iran, (New York, 2013), p. 91. 2

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NATIONALISM AND ISLAMISM AS CONSTITUENTS OF IRANIAN NATIONAL IDENTITY

Both nationalism and Islamism validate their ideological legitimacy with recourse to radically different conceptual and ontological premises. Nationalism follows an ideology of stratification that only recognises certain people as nationals within a particular territory, whereas Islam advocates the doctrine of the ummah, a transnational and de-territorialised notion of the Islamic peoples that underpins the unity and fraternity of all Muslims regardless of their nationality, race or ethnicity. Constructing a cohesive national identity has preoccupied Iranians and their political elites since the formation of modern Iran in 1925. Iranians have since been relentlessly prompted to change their conception of their national identity due to challenges arising from historical junctures such as the Islamic Revolution. The process of forging an Iranian national identity has always had to deal with the dichotomy between nationalism and Islamism. During the Pahlavi regime era, Iranian nationalism was premised on the grandeur of Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage, which was cast as the authentic source of Iranian identity and was advocated as ‘the notion of Iranianness’. 4 Since 1979, Islamism has sought to undermine these major aspects of secular Iranian nationalism, and the state has posited Islam as the only true source of legitimate identity for Iranians. The Islamic Republic has thus attempted to substitute the notion of an Iranian nation-focused identity with an Islamic one founded on religiosity. Through this the dominant, state-sponsored Islamic discourse has taken an anti-nationalist and pro-Islamic view of the ummah as integrally related to Iranian identity. Iranian Islamists regard nationalism as a projected product of the imperial West’s ideological subjugation of Islamic peoples, and hence as an instrument used to undermine the unity of Islam. 5 Afshin Mirashi, Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power & the State, 1870– 1940, (Seattle, 2008), p. 134. 5 Rasmus Elling, Minorities in Iran: Nationalism and Ethnicity after Khomeini, (New York, 2013), p. 87. 4

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As a result of this history of tension, Iranian identity has always been shaped and blighted by the schisms between its religious and national dimensions. Advocating a territorially defined nation, nationalism invoked the ancient pedigree of Iran (Persia) dating back to the pre-Islamic period. The Pahlavi era (1925–1979) witnessed state manipulation of public sentiments against Islam and its concomitant Arab ‘others’ which was designed to define an Iranian identity based on the Persian language, Zoroastrianism and ancient Persian imperial history. 6 The Islamicist discourse, adopted by Ayatollah Khomeini as the leader of the 1979 Revolution and the founder of the Islamic Republic, in contrary, espoused an anti-nationalist and thoroughly pro-Islamic stance which promoted “a universal message, a broad Islamic mandate”. 7 Ayatollah Khomeini considered national identities and irreligious affiliations as Western productions of subjugation aimed at undermining the ‘unity of Islam.’ Such a universal conception of the collective, the ummah, which clearly transcends national boundaries, contradicts the nationalist ideology that assumes the state and its boundaries to be central to the collective self. This is especially significant because both the Pahlavi Shahs and the Islamic revolutionaries depicted ‘Iran’ as an imagined community in order to (re)construct a national identity for their own political ends. Being a multi-ethnic country, Iran’s national identity is arbitrarily forged by historians and nationalist elites. As ethno-religious and sectarian identities are exceptionally diverse in Iran, Iranian nationalism cannot be rationally and empirically conceived as representing a uniform, unitary and monolithic concept. The ‘project’ of forging an Iranian identity is therefore laden with political vested interests. All national identities J. R. I. Cole, ‘Marking Boundaries, Marking Time. The Iranian Past and the Construction of the Self by Qajar Thinkers’, Conference of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, University of Michigan, 1995. Accessed January 16, 2015. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jrcole/ boundar.htm 7 Fouad Ajami, ‘Iran: The Impossible Revolution’, Foreign Affairs, Winter (1988/89), p. 137. 6

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are made in this exclusive and homogenizing way, but the case of Iranian national identity is immensely complex and its analysis requires a high degree of patience and a willingness to look into its numerous internal conflicts and contradictions to explain both its success and its failures. Since the initiation of its nation-state building process, Iran has attempted to define its national identity in a politically relevant and resonant way. The plethora of theoretical issues emerging in Iranian identity construction includes how Iranians conceive of themselves, the relationship between political identity and national interest, and the international image that Iranians convey of themselves. The concept of nation-statehood has been added to the jargon of Iranian politics relatively recently. In fact, Iran’s geographical boundaries were relentlessly in flux prior to the twentieth century when Iranian borders were rigidly demarcated by Western powers. Earlier attempts to impose political unity through centralization and institutionalisation go back to the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736) when Shiism was officially recognised as legitimate as opposed to Turkish and Arab Sunnism, which was sequestered from legitimate public life. Shiism was therefore employed as a core factor in distinguishing Iranians from their others, and in legitimizing the central governmental apparatus. 8 The consolidation of national borders and the establishment of stronger central governments over the course of the twentieth century created a new sense of territorial identity for the Iranians. This territorial nationalism was not, however, endorsed by the ethnic minority communities, which were distinguished by their language, culture and geographical loci. The political relations between these minorities and Tehran were at times limited and at times very hostile. The autonomy and authority of many ethnic governors went far beyond mere subordination in that they had often their own independent armies and even signed political treaties with foreign powers. The strict demarcation of Iranian boundaries in the 20th Century made land and borders much more important criteria in defining Iranian nationality. A diverse range of people found 8

A. R. Sheikholesalmi, From Religious, pp. 227–256.

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themselves under the unified banner of the centralised Iranian government. This territorially conceived nationality was inevitably Persian because Persians constitute the dominant ethnic majority and have a history of imposing their cultural hegemony on the other minorities. Consequently, Tehran embraced centralisation and assimilation policies aimed at reinforcing the country’s territorial integrity. 9 This process of nation-state formation necessarily required ideological and historical reasoning. Orientalism, therefore, was appealed to. This discourse had a profound impact on Iranian national identity. Orientalism, Said argues, is “an enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage and even produce the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post Enlightenment period.” 10 In other words, Orientalism then is about how the West conceives of and represents ‘its’ Orient. The negative anti-Islamist stance of the new state was conceptually supplemented by the quasi-historical positive doctrine of Aryanism. The Iranian race, identified with the Aryan race, was considered to be intrinsically superior to other races. Vaziri, discussing the role Orientalism has played in Iran’s understanding of its national identity, contends that the Orientalists reconstructed Iranian identity. 11 None-specialist Iranian historians, like Ahmad Kasravi and Abdolhossein Zarinkoob, adopted Aryanism and it was presented as the ‘active agent’ behind what was proposed to be a grounded and historically meaningful national identity. 12 Their limited scope of reference and uncritical approach to methodology inevitably led to a set of historiographical works that was highly ideologically Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, ‘Fragile Frontiers: The Diminishing Domains of Qajar Iran’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29/2 (1997), p. 227. 10 Edward Said, Orientalism, Western Conception of the Orient, (London, 1978), p. 3. 11 Mostafa Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation, (New York, 1993), p. 7. 12 Farzin Vejdani, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture, (Stanford, 2015), p. 5. 9

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infused. Zahed, discussing Iranian writers’ shortcomings, argues that, “most [of these] writers are expert in literature rather than history. Their writings are good on textual analysis but they are not written according to historical or scientific tradition. They [Iranian historians] work according to political or ideological lines, not critical or scientific ones. They have considered Persian literature to be the main element of identity at the expense of other disciplines”. 13 The Pahlavis, in defining and remaking Iranian national identity, used nationalism and secularism as sources of identification to such an extreme extent that these histories, by necessity, had to be mythological. The ‘Indo-European’ language classification system used by Western Orientalists to link the Europeans and Aryans into a superior narrative was a key factor behind this apparent obsession with Aryan-Persian superiority. As Vaziri puts it, “The ancient civilization and historical achievements of many races and people in various periods, representing the outcome of complex historical process, were conclusively reasoned to be Iranian and particularly a virtue of the Aryan people.” 14 Secular Iranian enthusiasts of nationalism, who accused Islam and the Arabs of destroying the glory of ancient Persia, considered Islam to be obsolete and adopted an associated anti-Arab approach to Iranian identity. As a result, a deep-seated chauvinism regarding Arab neighbours was actively encouraged among the Persian elite and Iranian intellectuals. 15 Rejecting Islamic creeds and concepts by advocating the superiority of Persian civilisation, Iranian nationalists sought a Persian resurgence and a revival of Aryan glory. In his quest for a proud Persian heritage, Shayegan asserts that, “for more than three centuries we, the heirs of the civilisations of Asia and Africa, have Saeid Zahed, ‘Iranian National Identity in the Context of globalization: dialogue or resistance?’, CSGR Working Paper, No. 162/05 (2004), p. 10. 14 Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation, p. 62. 15 Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, ‘Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the “Aryan” Discourse in Iran’, Iranian Studies, 44/4 (2011), pp. 466–467. 13

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been ‘on holiday’ from history”. 16 Similarly, stressing Iran’s authenticity, Amuzegar argued that, “we were invaded by Greeks, Arabs, Mongols, and Turks, but we did not lose our originality”. 17 The inclusion of diverse ethnicities, languages, territories, sectarianisms and religions further complicates our picture of Iranian national identity. Kashani-Sabet, in discussing the uniqueness of Iranian national identity, argues that Iranian national identity “is the way in which the varying emphases on these complementary but often competing articulations of nationalism have transformed Iranian politics in radical ways”. 18 Bereft of a coherent unity, Iranian identity has always been heterogeneous in its different historical phases, and has manifested severe rifts as well as violent radicalism. The Persian language was the primary characteristic of modern Iranianness, while Shiism was juxtaposed with it at strategically important times.

THE PAHLAVIS AND NATIONALISM

The Pahlavi dynasty exercised a profound influence on Iran’s national identity. As Zahed observes, Reza Shah sought “to crystallize Iranian identity in a centralized state with certain ideas. Reza Khan tried to condense a large population with many variations into a small cultural sphere”. 19 This has echoes of the process of nation-state formation that Kuyucu describes: “[n]ations, as categories of belonging and sources of political and cultural identity, are actively, and often violently, constructed by modern, centralising states.” 20 Daryush Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, (London, 1992), p. 153. 17 Quoted in: William Forbis, Fall of the Peacock Throne. The Story of Iran, (New York, 1980). 18 Firrozeh Kashani-Sabet, ‘The Evolving Polemic of Iranian Nationalism’, in Iran and the Surrounding World, Eds. Nikki R. Keddie, Rudi Matthee, (Seattle, 2002). 19 S. Zahed, Iranian National Identity, p. 17. 20 Ali. T Kuyucu, ‘Ethno-religious “unmixing of Turkey”, Nations and Nationalism’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, 11/3 (2005), p. 364. 16

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Reza Shah’s contribution to the formation of Iranian nationalism was twofold: he underlined the secularism of the state and bureaucratic system, and he attempted to diminish and sequester the influence of Islam. Accordingly, his nation-state building process was based on the three main tenets of nationalism, secularism and modernisation. As summarised by Vanessa Martin: The presiding ethos of the new system was a militant form of secular nationalism, with a vision of Iran regaining the glories of its pre-Islamic past…The eras of the Achaemanids and Sassanians 21 were recalled as glorious examples of what Iran could still become…A major step to the return to past glories was perceived to be secularism, and the division of religion and state. Reza Shah [was] determined to remove the influence of religion from politics and above all to undermine the political influence of the clerics. Iran did not, unlike Turkey, have a tradition of a powerful state and acquiescent Sunni ulama (group of clerical scholars), so it was not possible even for Reza Shah to go as far as disestablishing Islam…The emphasis on the pre-Islamic past was also intended to help forge a modern national identity, but to a population that was…devout Shi‘a, the vision meant little. 22

In pursuit of his nationalist agenda, Reza Shah changed the country’s name from Persia to Iran, i.e. the land of the Aryans, in order to consecrate in name the superiority of the Aryan race over its non-Aryan ethnic minorities and neighbours. Furthermore, he changed Iran’s calendar from the Islamic lunar to a Persian solar calendar to seek to symbolically disconnect the notion of ‘Persia’ from the identity of the Arabs, who were accused of imposing Islam on Iranians. 23 Reza Shah’s attempts at the de-Islamisation of An ancient Persian dynasty founded by Achaemenes in the 7th century BC. The Macmillan Encyclopaedia, (London, 2001), p. 8. 22 Vanessa Martin, Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran, (London, 2000), p. 13. 23 Alam Saleh, James Worrall, ‘Between Darius and Khomeini: exploring Iran’s national identity problematique’, National Identities, 17/1 (2015). 21

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Iranian society were soon transposed into simply anti-Arab sentiments. He undermined the Arabs and the Islamic facet of Iranian history, while glorifying the proud history of Persia’s ancient empires. As Graham argues, “The stress placed upon Iran’s historic cultural identity underlines the tremendous sense of insecurity that runs right through the Iranian psyche.” 24 The establishment of a national army and a secular jurisprudence were two crucial policy steps in creating a modern state. 25 European civil laws 26 and apparel norms were forcibly introduced and traditional Islamic outfits were banned. History was thus forcibly rewritten in name, legislature, constitution and even fashion. Iranian discourse was dominated by Aryanism, and the political rights of non-Persian ethnic groups were denied. 27 Reza Shah believed that an effective modern state would only be possible once all ethnic minorities had been fully assimilated and once a strong and centralized regimen of political and normative Aryanism ruled the country. 28 His surname, Pahlavi, the name of an ancient, pre-Islamic Persian empire, was a symbolic emphasizing of Iranian nationalism. His son, Mohammad Reza Shah, elaborating on the Pahlavi surname, wrote that “[t]he name Pahlavi has deep roots in our country’s history: it is the name of the officials and of the emperors during the Sassanid era. It is the patronym which he left me and which I bequeath to my children”. 29 In his effort to reformulate the people’s national identity, Reza Shah sought to curb the power of religious and ethnic minority leaders. In doing so, Reza Shah adopted a fervent policy of eradication of ethnic identity through assimilation/Persianization 24 25

p. 167.

26

p. 90.

Robert Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power, (London, 1978), p. 194. Hamid Ahmadi, Qoumiyat va Qoum garayi dar Iran, (Tehran, 2000), Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, (Princeton, 1982),

Farideh Koohi Kamali, The Political Development of the Kurds in Iran, (London, 2003), p. 8. 28 Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, (London, 1998), p. 333. 29 Mohammad. R. Pahlavi, Answer to History, (New York, 1980), p. 53. 27

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policies. As Sanasarian puts it, “the Pahlavi rulers’ policy on ethnonationals and religious minorities was shaped by a goal to homogenize society and do away with diversity – to make everyone in an ethnic and religious minority into an ‘Iranian’.’’ 30 Keddie states that: Several features of pre-Islamic Iran have become important for the trend of Iranian nationalism dominated under the Pahlavi shah. To weaken the power of the clergy and to provide support for a centralized national state, these shahs and many intellectuals glorified pre-Islamic Iran and even Zoroastrianism, which had previously been despised. Hence this ancient history is not distant for many Iranians, especially of the educated classes, but is rather a model for a strong, independent Iran, while they see the Arab-Islamic conquest as a negative event which brought, cultural and political decline. (This view is greatly exaggerated, as Iran’s greatest scholarly, philosophical, and literary work took place after the Islamic conquests.) The views of those who stress Islam are quite different. 31

Both Reza Shah and Mohammad Reza Shah promoted a nationalist form of Persian-centric orthodoxy based on opposition to Islamic, Arab and ethnic minority others. This ultimately combined with external international events to lead to a violent confrontation with Islam in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In Bashiriyeh’s words: [T]wo competing paradigms of Iranian identity – nationalism and political Islam – have been instrumental in legitimizing the states’ political system for both regimes; the ancient ideology of Persianism on the part of the Pahlavi Shahs on the one hand, and on the other hand the Islamic ideology propagated by the Islamic Shia. 32

E. Sanasarian, Religious Minorities, p. 5. Nikki Keddie, ‘Iran: Understanding the Enigma: A Historians View’, Meria 2/3 (1998), pp. 1–7. 32 Hossein Bashiriyeh, ‘Ideologi-ye Siasi va Hoveyat-e Ejtema’i Iran. Iran Nameh’, 23/3 (2003), pp. 271–285. 30 31

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A schism between ancient Persianism and Shi‘a Islamism has been a constant feature of a national identity in Iran that is dichotomous and conflictive. This ideological confrontation over identity provoked stark Islamist reaction in Iran. Discussing his father’s secular reform policies, Mohammad Reza Shah noted that: My father’s reforms had reduced the clergy’s authority in secular matters. Thus, from 1926 a certain section of the ecclesiastical hierarchy was openly opposed to the shah’s reforms and to Iran’s metamorphosis into a modern nation. This opposition made itself felt again at the time of the 1952– 1953 uprising, in 1963 and 1978–1979. 33

Reza Shah’s nationalist policies and those of his son Mohammad Reza Shah have influenced Iran’s nation-state building process to date, because the incumbent Islamic regime was in huge part a symbolic rejection of this secular ideology. The Shahs based their security strategies on coercive centralisation and on crude assimilationist policies. These national identity policies have, however, dramatically changed since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, with Islam now constituting the major source of national identity in Iran. This has further convoluted Iran’s national identity, because the dichotomous other to the Islamic regime, the spectre of Aryanism, continues to impact on Iranian understandings of self.

KHOMEINISM AND ISLAMISM

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Tehran has based its state legitimacy and its socio-cultural policies entirely on Islamism/Shiism. 34 Ayatollah Khomeini understood the Islamic community only within the framework of the concept of the

M. R. Pahlavi, Answer, p. 56. Annabelle Sreberny, ‘Thirty-Plus Years of the Iranian Revolution: Culture in Contestation’, in Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic, Eds. A. Sreberny, M. Torfeh, (London, 2013), p. 1. 33 34

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Islamic ummah. 35 While nationalism was defined territorially and ethnically, the transnational and transcendent nature of the ummah implies the unity of all Muslims regardless of their nationality, ethnicity or race. Islam does not recognise the ontological or metaphysical groundings of geographical and ethnical nationalisms. The ummah is often regarded as an imaginary term, and rather utopian, but its conceptual distinction from the nation-states of modernity is undoubtable. 36 Ayatollah Khomeini persistently challenged the Shahs’ nationalism and regarded Islamic Iran as the only glorious part of the country’s history. He wrote that “[b]efore Islam, the lands now blessed by our True Faith suffered miserably because of ignorance and cruelty. There is nothing in that past that is worth glorification. We will break all the poison pens of those who speak of nationalism, democracy, and such things.” 37 In sum, contrary to the pan-nationalist discourse that glorified the pre-Islamic heritage of Iran as an age of modernisation and magnificence, the Islamic republican discourse depicted it as a non-Islamic, alien and imported Western product. Ayatollah Khomeini describes Iran’s relationship with its monarchies in the following way: “it concerns a nation which throughout history has suffered under the rule of kings. Throughout a 2,500-year history it has been under the rule of kings, kings who have brought it nothing but suffering and misery. Even those supposedly just rulers were also evil… Yes, throughout history this nation has lived under the rule and oppression of these evil kings.” 38 Cottam, exploring the emerging Islamic discursive challenge to Persianism, argues that to Khominei “nationalism and liberalism Richard Cottam, ‘Inside Revolutionary Iran’, in Iran’s Revolution: The Search for Consensus, Ed. R. K. Ramazani, (Washington DC, 1990), p. 14. 36 Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam. The Search for a New Ummah, (New York, 2004), pp. 18–44. 37 Remarks to students and educators in Qom, 13/03/1979. 38 Khomeini’s speech. No 52. Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. Accessed January 18, 2015. http://www.irib.com/worldservice/imam/ speech/52.htm. 35

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alike are manifestations of Euro-American culture and hence deserving of total rejection.” Cottam adds that, “their [the supporters of Khomeini’s] view is that nationalism is a secular phenomenon and ‘secular’ implies a rejection of the divine plan implicit in the Koran for the creation of the good society”. 39 Islamists sought to eliminate any sign of secular nationalism in Iran, and posited Islam as the only authentic source of identity for Iranians. Tehran endeavoured (partly unsuccessfully) to replace an Iranian identity with an Islamic one. Zahed, discussing subsequent post-Revolutionary Islamization policies in Iran, states that: They worked on certain Islamic concepts such as Islamic Omah [sic], Muslim nation, Islamic Republic, Omah unity, Islam vs. the West and so forth, in order to foster a new identity for the nation. Islam increased its influence over social and cultural affairs. Iranian nationalism, in its Pahlavi guise, was rejected. Attention was not given to Iranian literature. Such insistence on Islamic identity weakened a part of Iran’s historical identity as well as its relationship with other nations. 40

Ayatollah Khomeini perceived the state as an Islamic entity that could be legitimated only through Islam. He believed that the Pahlavi regime was illegitimate because its political system was not founded on Islamic principles and was explicitly secular. The only conception of legal government for Ayatollah Khomeini is based on Islamic ideas. He insisted that: Not one of these existing forms of government, be it republican, monarchical, constitutional or dictatorial, can be said to be a form of government which is just, a government which really improves people’s lives, which truly governs for the sake of the people and not for the superpowers or for themselves. No indeed, no such government presently exists. The government sought by us is an Islamic government. If an

29.

39 40

J. A. Bill, Musaddiq, Iranian Nationalism and Oil, (London, 1988), p.

S. Zahed, Iranian National Identity, p. 21.

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ALAM SALEH Islamic government was in these countries or in our own country of Iran, then everyone would see just what form a government should in fact take - this has been carefully specified in Islam. Should a ruler not fulfil these requirements then he will inevitably fall from power. 41

Ayatollah Khomeini asserted that to attain an authentic identity – one grounded in cosmic meaning and devoid of secular mistakes – Islam should be actively promoted. He stated that “[t]he Iranian people have risen today to revive Islam and Islamic laws. Their uprising is unique in the history of Islam and Iran, for it is so deeprooted and fundamental”. 42 Religious institutions were soon utilized to effectively maintain and propagate an Islamic ideology in the immediate aftermath of the 1979 Revolution. The Islamic Revolution, ultimately, managed to stimulate people’s religiosity at a time of social tension so as to promote a ‘pure’ Islamic identity. This invoked a cultural revolution in which the universities were shut down in 1980 for two years in an attempt to dispense with higher education, being, as it was perceived, based on Western and non-Islamic trends of social and political modernisation. The normative cause of the Revolution was Islam rather than liberty. In the resultant new discourse on identity, Islam was the only and supreme reference point. Ayatollah Khomeini, for instance, argued that: Our aim was not mere freedom. Our aim was not mere independence. We did not want to be free like Sweden; they may be free, they may be independent, but they have no Quranic awareness (…) What do you suppose the Iranian wanted? Did they want Islam? Did they die for the Quran? We did not shed the blood of our youths for mere material gains. Our martyrs gave up their lives; they willingly espoused death, to make this the land of Islam. They did not die for freedom or

Khomeini’s speech. No 41. Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. Accessed January 18, 2015. http://www.irib.com/worldservice/imam/ speech/41.htm. 42 Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. No 38. Accessed January 18, 2015. http://www.irib.com/worldservice/imam/speech/test3.htm. 41

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liberty, they died to make this an Islamic State and we will make sure that their death is not in vain, that it is not made pointless by the libertines who survived. 43

Khomeini frequently repeated that nationalism was an imported western product designed to divide Muslims and he stated without equivocation that “Islam is against nationality”. 44 Instead, he emphasised the significance of the concept of the ummah, which, according to Roy, emphasizes the de-territorialisation of the Muslim community, and acknowledges no racial or ethno-national differences. Ayatollah Khomeini attempted to undermine the rule of Pahlavis by conflating their non-Islamic approach to society and governance with apostasy. “This government [the monarchic regime] represents a regime whose leader (as was his father) is illegally in power,” Ayatollah Khomeini maintained that, “This government is therefore illegal. The deputies appointed to work in the Majlis [Parliament] are there illegally. The Majlis itself and the Senate are illegal.” 45 Soon after the Revolution, the eight-year long Iran-Iraq war began. Facing both internal and external threats, the war had an intense impact on Iran’s national security and national identity discourses. In extreme wartime conditions, the regime’s leaders securitized sensitive socio-political issues. The ultimate goals during this era were focused around Iran’s territorial integrity and the protection of Islamic values. But the war against Iraq made Tehran gradually ease its restrictive Islamic orders in favour of a tentative nationalism. In order to undermine Ayatollah Khomeini’s religious authority, Saddam Hussein compared the war with Iran to the Muslim/Arab invasion of Persia in the early Islamic period. This war had subordinated the Persians under Islamic rule. Saddam also Khomeini, Speaking on 6 June 1979. in Hamid Omid, Islam and the Post Revolutionary State in Iran, (New York, 1994), p. 154. 44 This quote is also listed in Mehregan Magazine, 12/1&2 (2003), p. 16. 45 Khomeini’s speeches, accessed January 16, 2015. http://www.bbc. co.uk/persian/revolution/khomeini.shtml. 43

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made territorial claims that undermined Iran’s territorial integrity. 46 The war was thus deemed a threat not only to the territorial integrity of the country but also to the political and ideological authority of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Whereas the Islamic Revolution had constituted a paradigmatic Islamic shift in every socio-cultural aspect of Iranian domestic society, the war exposed the irrelevance of the Islamic Republic’s discourse on ummah, as well as the territorially defined nature of Iran as a political entity. Thus, the regime appealed to certain tentative notions of nationalism. Tehran stayed firm in defending and defining its borders and territorial disputes with its neighbouring countries in a nationalistic way. 47 With the emergence of security challenges, nationalist ideologies were adopted alongside both populist and state-directed policies in order to protect Iran’s territorial integrity. The Islamic Revolution of 1979, with its Islamic and internationalist stance, was conceptually profoundly challenged by this nationalism. Shi‘a ideology and religious notions such as jihad, martyrdom, and the beloved land, 48 were used at this time to inspire both Iran’s Islamic and its nationalist roots and narratives. 49 Despite this short ideological coupling of opposing concepts, the fundamental differences between Islamist and nationalist sources of identity have emerged among citizens and in the state during the last century. Increasing disenchantment with Islamic ideas in the post-war and post-Khomeini era has shifted people’s identification in opposing and fraught directions. 50 The ancient past Milton. J. Esman, An Introduction to Ethnic Conflicts, (Cambridge, 2004), p. 103. 47Abu Musa, Greater and Lesser Tunbs are islands on the eastern side of the Persian Gulf. Since 1971, these islands are claimed by both Iran and the United Arab Emirates. 48 Charles Melville, The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 764. 49 Muhammad Javad Gholamreza Kashi, Jadouye goftar: zehniat-e farhangi va nezam-e maʿani dar entekhabat-e dovom-e khordad, (Tehran, 2000), pp. 326–334. 50 ‘Polling Iranian Public Opinion: An Unprecedented Nationwide Survey of Iran’, Terror Free Tomorrow (2007). Accessed January 16, 2015, 46

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has, yet again, turned into a source of anti-clerical and anti-Arab discourse among people across different social classes and strata.

THE DICHOTOMY OF IRANIANNESS AND ISLAMICNESS

Iranians have encountered several major historical events during the last century that have driven and necessitated a modification of their national identity and a refashioning of Iranian identity. Two revolutions, the demise of two dynasties, the exile of several Shahs, a military coup, several popular mobilisations, attempts to demolish the national Parliament, long periods of international sanctions and foreign invasions and interventions, have together preoccupied and confused the country’s national identity. The Islamic Revolution in 1979 has also deeply complicated the crucial question of who the Iranians are. Nations are socio-historically constructed and are invented “where they do not exist”. 51 Elites, media mechanisms, publications, administrative regulations and educational systems are instrumental in negatively portraying other nations and in imaginatively glorifying national-selves. 52 Iranian national identity is – like all – based on anti-other sentiments and biased stereotypes of neighbouring and far-flung nations. This is particularly important since many Iranian ethnic minorities are transnational and share a common identity with the citizens of neighbouring countries. Nationalist Iranians have perceived Iranian culture to be linguistically and ethnically pure and historically grounded. Nevertheless, Islamist thinkers, including Ali Shariati, have sought a radically different source of identity for the Iranians. As Zahed explains, Shariati “called youths and university students to Islam by insisting on a return to the self: to Iran’s ‘own’ culture. He defined this as a return to pure Islam”. 53 He believed “that religion is a pp. 2–4. http://www.terrorfreetomorrow.org/upimagestft/TFT%20Iran %20Survey%20Report.pdf. 51 Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, (London, 1964), p. 169. 52 Benedict Anderson, Imagined communities, reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, (London, 1991), pp. 33–36. 53 S. Zahed, Iranian National Identity, p. 19.

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most effective weapon to fight against imperialism and Western cultural domination.” 54 Projects of national identity construction in Iran have always attempted to manage this dichotomy between Islamism and nationalism, pre-Islamic and post-Islamic, pro-Western and antiimperialist discourses. In Maloney’s words, “these three components of Iranian identity, nationalism, Islamism, and antiimperialism, have coexisted throughout its modern history, often in combination but equally often in competition”. 55 Confusion forged as a result of this multidimensional identity has caused the nationalist project to become chauvinistic and the religious discourse to spill into fanaticism. 56 These struggles between Iran’s contradictory sources of national identity have, arguably, resulted in a kind of endemic identity crisis. 57 Confusion in Iranian national identity is the consequence of social change and political engineering by the Shahs or the Imams. This endemic and perpetual confusion is indicative of the fact that membership of different (often opposed) identity groups is a common feature of humankind’s political life. Iran’s uneasy and ambivalent relationship with modernity has made the Iranian identity even more challenging a feature of Iranian life. The dichotomous dynamic of Iranian identity is evident in Iran’s Islamised national security discourse. In the Islamic republic, all governmental agencies covering cultural, social, political and economic policy decisions as well as defence measures are committed to Islamic values and principles, 58 as embodied in the statement “[o]ur religion is the same as our politics and our politics Mansoor Moaddel, Class, Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution, (New York, 1993), p. 152. 55 Suzanne Maloney, ‘Identity and Change in Iran’s Foreign Policy’, in Identity and Foreign Policy in the Policy in the Middle East, Eds. S. Telhami, M. Barnett, (New York, 2002), p. 102. 56 E. Sanasarian, Religious Minorities, p. 1. 57 H. Ahmadi, Qoumiyat, p. 76. 58 Afshin Shahi, Alam Saleh, ‘Andalusiasation: Is Iran on the Trajectory of De-Islamisation?’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42/4 (2015), p. 502. 54

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is the same as our religion”. 59 According to the 1979 constitution Iran is an Islamic republic. As article 3 of the constitution says, the goal of the regime is ‘framing the foreign policy of the country on the basis of Islamic criteria, fraternal commitment to all Muslims, and unsparing support to the freedom fighters of the world’. 60 National security in post-revolutionary Iran was largely based on Islamic ideology. The revolutionary leaders at that time sought to secure the Revolution, not only by promoting Islamic values within Iranian society, but also by adopting the doctrine of the ummah, and exporting it beyond the borders. 61 Therefore, the security of the ummah replaced the notion of the security of the Iranian nation. For instance, the Revolutionary Guards categorize security threats into three forms: hard threats (military); Semi-hard threats (security); and soft threats (concerning cultural and religious values). Therefore, their mission varies and includes a vast range of security tasks such as confronting ethnic separatist movements, countering subversive groups, tackling attempted military coups, law enforcement, and the defence of Islamic-revolutionary values. 62 The chief commander of the Revolutionary Guards, in February 2009, stated that “the enemy is targeting the foundation of the Islamic Revolution, attacking people’s religious, political, and ideological beliefs, aiming at the Revolution and its values”. 63 The armed forces mission, therefore, is not restricted by the constitution to the preservation of territorial integrity only, but includes the struggle for expansion of the Islamic mission universally. Seyyed Hassan Modarres, quoted in E. H. Chehabi, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism, (London, 1990), p. 46. 60 The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, (Tehran, 1979), Article 3/16. 61 Barry Buzan, People, States and fear: An agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-Cold War Era, (London, 1991), p. 82. 62 Pour M. Nazar, Ashenayi Ba Nezame Joumhori Islami Iran [Knowing the Islamic Republic of Iran], (Qom, 2008), pp. 140–141. 63 BBC, Basij to Confront the Soft Threats. Accessed January 31, 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/persian/iran/2009/02/090209_mg_basij_jafari.sh tml. 59

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In sum, the issue of national security is integrated with the preservation of Islam and Muslims. Article 144 of the constitution states that, ‘[t]he Army of the Islamic Republic of Iran must be an Islamic Army, i.e., committed to Islamic ideology and the people, and must recruit into its service individuals who have faith in the objectives of the Islamic Revolution and are devoted to the cause of realizing its goals’. Shakeri explains the religious orientation of the Revolutionary Guards as follows: According to the Guards Corps’ statute, a ‘guardian is referred to a person who is ready for the fully fledged Holy War for God’s sake and for safeguarding the Islamic Revolution as a religious obligation and who possesses qualifications including belief in the foundations of Islam, the Islamic Revolution and the Islamic Republic system and a belief in and practical allegiance to the tutelage of jurisprudence, as well as who exhibits practical allegiance to the Islamic commandments and the Islamic Republic’s law and abidance with the Islamic morality’. 64

Today, Tehran adopts a straightforwardly anti-imperialist stance in order to strengthen national unity by exacerbating the real threats posed to it. As the revolutionary slogans that called for independence from foreign powers indicate, the struggle to maintain the country’s national ‘dignity’ has been arduous and challenging. Sariolghalam notes that “Iran’s concept of political sovereignty has deep nationalist and Shi‘a roots that will hold for many years to come as Iranians struggle with efforts to balance interaction with the world.” 65 Mashayekhi, in explaining Iran’s xenophobic predisposition, states that: “Major invasions by Greeks (334–330 BC), Arabs (seventh century), Turks (eleventh century), and Mongols (thirteenth century) contributed to the formation of a foreign-suspicious collective memory; a mass psychological defence S. R. Shakeri, ‘Islamic Bases of National Security in the Islamic Republic of Iran From a Constitutional Perspective’, Strategic Studies Quarterly, 6/ 2 (2006), p. 66. 65 Mahmood Sariolghalam, ‘Understanding Iran: Getting Past Stereotypes and Mythology’, The Washington Quarterly, 26/4 (2003), p. 69. 64

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mechanism that helped Iranians to adjust themselves to the alien forces undermining their collective identity.” 66 These negative historical experiences have further informed a discourse founded on an Iranian us versus a multi-faceted them. 67 The Islamic Republic leverages this heritage when it depicts itself as the true guardian of Iran’s security and its ‘authentic identity’ today. 68 In explaining the regime’s inherent paranoia, Gregory F. Giles traces this sense of insecurity to a “series of conquests suffered by Persia over the centuries, which have left Iranians highly suspicious of foreigners. [These] periods of foreign domination appear to have fundamentally shaped Iranian interpersonal and, by extrapolation, international behaviour”. 69

CONCLUSION

Nationalism and Islamism, as the two main constituents of Iranian national identity in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, still remain instrumental in defining Iran’s national identity. This chapter has argued that the schism between nationalism and Islamism and the concomitant collective psychological dichotomy in the Iranian understanding of itself is central to any understanding of Iran’s national identity. This schism and collective-psychological dichotomy is also core to analysing Iranian policy and international behaviour. The historical roots of these two constitutive ideologies in Iran have been outlined and it has been shown that Islamic ideology and its contradictions with Iranian nationalism have had to be constantly managed as competing narratives with equally and highly powerful political implications for Iran and its government. Mehrdad Mashayekhi in Iran, Political culture in the Islamic Republic, Eds. S. K. Farsoun, M. Mashayekhi, (London, 1992), p. 85. 67 R. Hinnebusch, A. Ehteshami, The Foreign, p. 287. 68 On this point see Shahram Chubin and Robert S. Litvak, ‘Debating Iran’s Nuclear Aspirations’, The Washington Quarterly, 26/4 (2003), pp. 99–114. 69 Gregory F. Giles, Chapter 6, ‘The Crucible of Radical Islam: Iran’s Leaders and Strategic Culture’. Accessed February, 17, 2015. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cpc-pubs/know_thy_enemy/ giles.pdf, p. 146. 66

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Nationalism and Islamism claim their ideological legitimacy on conceptually opposed and ontologically incompatible grounds. Nationalism recognises the identity of certain people as ‘nationals’ within a particular geographical territory and under a given political system. Islam, on the contrary, stresses the unity of a transcendent Muslim community under the doctrine of ummah, which is “clearly internationalist, declaring the unity and brotherhood of all Muslims in one umma” 70 regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, language, geography or political institutions. Nationalism, in Iran, has been founded on the quasi-historical narrative of Persianism as the authentic source of national identity, and Iranian nationalism advocates territorial patriotism. Underscoring the Persian language, Iran’s Zoroastrian cultural heritage and the ‘imperial history’ of Persia and its ‘civilization’, Iranian nationalism has taken an antiIslamic and often anti-Arab position – one that the Islamic Revolution rejected outright. The Pahlavi regime attempted to respond to the identity problem of Iran by advocating a Persianization strategy, which eventually provoked the Islamists’ wrath in 1979. Khomeini’s subsequent Islamic discourse nonetheless promoted an equally exclusive identification with its anti-Western and pro-Islamic worldview shaped by notions of the ummah. Accordingly, nationalist narratives and policies were regarded as an imported product of the West and as illegitimate and against Islam. This chapter has argued that the Islamic doctrine of ummah cannot be easily reconciled with state-centric nationalist sentiments in Iranian understandings of the self. The result of confrontational ideological struggle, the dichotomous Iranian identity has been a feature of Iranian political life since the establishment of the modern Iranian state-nation nearly a century ago. Each of these two ideologies defines itself by denying the other. With Iranian citizens having been Persianised and Islamised in turn, these two ideologies have mobilizing power in Dov Waxman, ‘The Islamic Republic of Iran: Between Revolutionary and Realpolitik’, Conflict Studies, Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, UK, 308 (1998), p. 12. 70

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Iran, and the denial of one or another of them is a vital component of any Iranian regime’s political strategy. 71 The discourse of Persian nationalism failed to include nonPersian ethnic groups, and the Islamic-Shi‘a ideology of the 1979 Revolution in turn excluded the Sunni population of the country. In short, many Iranians today perceive their identity in negative terms; that is to say, they refer to what they are not, rather than what they are. Some equate Iranianess with being Persian, while others understand it as not being an Arab, 72 a Turk, or Sunni. Shiism has even been thought of by some as an Iranian interpretation of Islam, a Persian version of an Arab-sourced monotheism. Some Iranians, therefore, would rather call themselves Shi‘a and use Shiism as their distinguishing identity. At the level of state politics, the Islamic Republic has depicted itself as the leader of the Shi‘a world. But in territorial disputes between the Shi‘a Republic of Azerbaijan and Christian Armenia, Iran has consistently sided in favour of Armenia, a policy that contradicts its ideological and discursive positioning as the leading Shi‘a representative. 73 The Islamic Republic has essentially often adopted realist rather than ideologically spurred approaches in its foreign and intra-regional policies. 74 Religious institutions and conservatives have also appealed to nationalist rhetoric in order to present their discourse as more inclusive. This is not to say that secular and reformist groups can disregard the role of religion and Shiism in the society and politics too. It is simply to make clear that the on-going dichotomy between Islamism and nationalism is a perpetually debilitating and also politically potent facet of Iranian politics – Iranian leaders and governance institutions can choose to manage it in pragmatic ways, or to radicalise the promotion of just one side of the dichotomy. They cannot, in the foreseeable future, wish the schism away or get rid of it by force. Afshin Shahi, ‘The Islamic Cultural Revolution and the Consolidation of the Islamic Republic’, Journal of European Society for Iranian Studies, 3, no. I (2006). 72 R. Elling, Minorities, pp. 165–166. 73 A. Saleh, Ethnic Identity, p. 81. 74 R. Hinnebusch, A. Ehteshami, The Foreign, pp. 283–307. 71

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pubs/know_thy_enemy/ giles.pdf Cyrus Ghani, Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah, (London, 1998). Muhammad Javad Gholamreza Kashi, Jadouye goftar: zehniat-e farhangi va nezam-e maʿani dar entekhabat-e dovom-e khordad, (Tehran, 2000). Robert Graham, Iran: The Illusion of Power, (London, 1978). Raymond Hinnebusch, Anoushiravan Ehteshami, The Foreign Policies of Middle East States, (London, 2002). Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Fragile Frontiers: The Diminishing Domains of Qajar Iran, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 29/2 (1997). Nikki R. Keddie, Rudi Matthee, Iran and the Surrounding World, (Seattle, 2002). Nikki Keddie, ‘Iran: Understanding the Enigma: A Historians View’, Meria, 2/3 (1998). Farideh Koohi Kamali, The Political Development of the Kurds in Iran, (London, 2003). Ali Tuna Kuyucu, ‘Ethno-religious unmixing of Turkey, Nations and Nationalis’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism, 11/3 (2005). Vannesa Martin, Creating an Islamic State: Khomeini and the Making of a New Iran, (London, 2000). Charles Peter Melvlle, The Cambridge History of Iran, vol.7, (Cambridge, 1991). Afshin Mirashi, Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power & the State, 1870– 1940, (Seattle, 2008). Mansoor Moaddel, Class, Politics, and Ideology in the Iranian Revolution, (New York, 1993). Mehdi Nazarpour, Ashenayi Ba Nezame Joumhori Islami Iran [Knowing the Islamic Republic of Iran], (Qom, 2008). Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam. The Search for a New Ummah, (New York, 2004). Homa Omid, Islam and the Post Revolutionary State in Iran, (New York, 1994). Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, Answer to History, (New York, 1980). Qanoon Asasi Gomhori Islami Iran [The constitution of the

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Islamic Republic of Iran. Tehran: Entesharat Agah, 1979), Article 3/16. Edward Said, Orientalism, Western Conception of the Orient, (London, 1978). Alam Saleh, Ethnic Identity and the State in Iran, (New York, 2013). Alam Saleh, James Worrall, ‘Between Darius and Khomeini: exploring Iran’s national identity problematique’, National Identities, 17/1 (2015). Eliz Sanasarian, Religious Minorities in Iran, (Cambridge, 2000). Afshin Shahi, ‘The Islamic Cultural Revolution and the Consolidation of the Islamic Republic’, Journal of European Society for Iranian Studies, 3, no. I (2006). Afshin Shahi, Alam Saleh, ‘Andalusiasation: Is Iran on the Trajectory of De-Islamisation?’, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 42/4 (2015). S. R. Shakeri, ‘Islamic Bases of National Security in the Islamic Republic of Iran From a Constitutional Perspective’, Strategic Studies Quarterly, (2006). Darius Shayegan, Cultural Schizophrenia: Islamic Societies Confronting the West, (London, 1992). Annabelle Sreberny, Torfeh, Massoumeh, Cultural Revolution in Iran: Contemporary Popular Culture in the Islamic Republic, (London, 2013). Shibley Telhami, Michael Barnett, Identity and Foreign Policy in the Policy in the Middle East, (New York, 2002). Mostafa Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation, (New York, 1993). Farzin Vejdani, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture, (Stanford, 2015). Dov. Waxman, ‘The Islamic Republic of Iran: Between Revolutionary and Realpolitik’, Conflict Studies, Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, UK., No. 308 (1998). Saied Zahed, ‘Iranian National Identity in the Context of globalization: dialogue or resistance?’, CSGR Working Paper, No. 162/05 (2004).

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Reza Zia-Ebrahimi, ‘Self-Orientalization and Dislocation: The Uses and Abuses of the “Aryan” Discourse in Iran’, Iranian Studies, 2011.

12. EVOLVING FACE OF PAKISTAN’S RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM RAJA MUHAMMAD ALI SALEEM 1 INTRODUCTION

The power of nationalism is manifest around the globe. It has inspired millions of people to liberation, freedom and selfdetermination. Since World War I, more people have been killed because of nationalism than any other ideology. However, nationalism had to contend with religion, a force that had ruled people’s minds since antiquity. In many countries, such as France, religion and nationalism became bitter rivals when nationalism tried to replace religion as the primary identity of the people. In other cases, national elites thought religion too powerful to defeat or/and too useful to discard and tried to use religion to strengthen nationalism. The social construct of a nation becomes more acceptable and legitimate if it feeds on the older construct of God’s ‘chosen people’. Religion was thus nationalized. However, this should not be construed as meaning that religion or religious actors were passive agents. Religious actors made their own decisions, sometimes opposing nationalism to hold their turf and at other times conquering or adopting nationalism to reinforce their power and influence. The relationship of religion and nationalism developed in three broad types. In some countries, organized religion and Raja M. Ali Saleem is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Public Policy and Governance, Forman Christian College, Pakistan. He is an alumnus of George Mason University. 1

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nationalism fought each other. France, Turkey and Mexico are examples of this dynamic. In most countries, however, religion and nationalism came to an understanding and had a symbiotic relationship. Nationalism was frequently the dominant partner in this relationship. England, Greece and Egypt are examples of this group. In a few countries, religion became the basis of nationalism and it became difficult to separate the two. These countries were often not theocracies but it was challenging to imagine the nation without thinking about the majority religion. Almost all of their national symbols (flags, anthems, emblems etc.) were related to the majority religion. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bhutan, Iran, Malta and Pakistan are prime examples of this type of religious nationalism. Looking at names of the religious nationalist states above, one could not help but notice that most of these are Muslim-majority countries (MMCs). Islam seems to be a bigger part of the nationalism of the MMCs than other religions are of the nationalisms of the non-Muslim majority countries. Is this because of some peculiarity of Islam or Muslim civilization as popularized by the Clash of Civilizations thesis? The diversity of around fifty MMCs, spread over three continents and separated by thousands of miles, belie the argument made by Huntington and others. A more reasonable explanation is based on the following reasons. First, almost all of the MMCs were colonized by countries that were (at least nominally) Christian. So, MMC’s nationalist leaders could and did use religion as a unifying and mobilizing instrument against the colonial powers. Islam thus contributed significantly to the nationalism of MMCs. Even in case of the MMCs that remained independent, like Iran, Afghanistan or very secular Turkey, fear of Western domination was real and Islam was a part of national identity. 2 Where religion of both colonized and colonizer was the same, as in case of African Christian-majority countries colonized by Christian Europeans, religion could not be Anee Marisa Schön, ‘The Construction of Turkish National Identity: Nationalization of Islam & Islamization of Nationhood’, (Tilburg University, 2013). http://productie.gx.uvt.nl/upload/4a61e225-9a7a4c58-a55c-dc711ca52b44_Anna%20Marisa%20Schoen%20-%20The% 20Construction%20of%20Turkish%20National%20Identity.pdf. 2

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used as a mobilizing/unifying force against colonizers and was, therefore, often not a major part of nationalism. 3 As the following table shows, most of the countries where majority religion was different from the colonizer’s religion were MMCs. Table 1: Countries where the Majority Religion of the Colonial power and the Colony were Dissimilar in the Mid-20th Century

Colony

Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East (Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait) Muslim-majority countries in Africa (Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Sudan, Chad, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Gambia, Somalia, Eretria, Guinea, Western Sahara) Muslim-majority countries in Central Asia (Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan, Kirgizstan) Muslim-majority countries in South and South East Asia (Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei) India Burma Sri Lanka Cambodia Laos Vietnam

Majority Religion Islam

Colonizer’s Religion Christianity

Islam

Christianity

Islam

Christianity

Islam

Christianity

Hinduism Buddhism Buddhism Buddhism Buddhism Buddhism

Christianity Christianity Christianity Christianity Christianity Christianity

Second, after independence, populations had to be socialized to take pride in their nations and, among other things, a real/mythical golden age had to be selected/invented. For most MMCs, Islam was part of this selected/invented national golden age, so Islam remained part of the national narrative. Not surprisingly, this African countries were not Christian-majority at the time of their colonization but many became Christian-majority before their nationalist movements matured in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. 3

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nationalist-Islamic socialization had the unintended consequence of a rising Islamic consciousness: In all efforts, although the intended goal was to advance nationalism, Islam gradually regained its popularity among the public. It was not possible to use Islam without creating a religiously ethical and conscious society. 4

Third, when the secular ideologies and secular nationalists failed in the Muslim world, Islam’s contribution became more important and visible. Bruce rightly explains the resurgence of religion as a political force: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rising nationalist movements, and the states they created, often called on a shared religious identity as the basis for a sense of unity among the chosen people. The new nationalisms of the first half of the twentieth century tended to eschew religion or even to suppress it. By then the dominant model of progress was secular and the new elites thought that discarding their religious heritage was as essential to progress as the replacement of the horse by the tractor. Many of the new nations failed to develop fast enough or failed to spread the benefits of development sufficiently, widely and eventually triggered waves of reaction that drew heavily on a religious heritage and identity. 5

Finally, failure of modernity and nationalism cannot explain the Islamic resurgence unless one brings back the state. National myths were chosen and propagated by the state elite in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, elites had to explain the failure of modernization to their populations, preferably glossing over their own mistakes. It was the decision of the elites to promote and utilize religion that was the final piece of the puzzle of the religious/Islamic Tamer Balci, ‘From Nationalization of Islam to Islamization of Nation: Clash of Islam and Secular Nationalism in the Middle East’, paper delivered at International Studies Association Conference in San Francisco (2008). 5 Steve Bruce, Politics and Religion, (Cambridge, 2003), p. 42. 4

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resurgence. Elites in the MMCs and other countries used religion for their own political ends and contributed to the rise of religious forces. 6

PAKISTAN’S RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM

Pakistan became independent in 1947 after a struggle not with only the British but also with the Congress, the leading nationalist party that claimed to represent all Indians, irrespective of their caste, creed, color or language. Indian Muslim elites argued that there was no such thing as an Indian nation. Rather, India was viewed as a sub-continent united not by a common culture, ethnicity or language but by the brute force of a colonial power. They claimed India has at least two nations, Muslims and Hindus. The struggle of Indian Muslims that began with the demands of recognition and autonomy gradually metamorphosed into a nationalist struggle for a separate homeland, after Congress refused to accept their initial demands. Religion was the primary ingredient in Pakistan’s nationalism. It was because of their common religion that Indian Muslims (who were themselves divided on the basis of ethnicity, language and culture) were claiming to be one nation and demanding partition of British India into two states. After securing a separate state, the national elite, most of whom were not religious, had to decide the role of Islam in the new state. Most of them saw Islam as an important part of the national identity and a source of broad guiding principles but they had no intention of implementing traditional Islamic law in the country. The religious elite, most of whom had opposed the creation of Pakistan, protested. They wanted to Islamize the state. To increase the legitimacy of their arguments, rhetoric and actions, both contending groups based their arguments on the statements of Jinnah, the founding father who died in 1948. The ruling elite pointed to Jinnah’s secular lifestyle, to his categorical rejection of theocracy, and to his speeches where Islam was primarily defined as justice, democracy, fair play and equality: 6

2010).

Scott W. Hibbard, Religious Politics and Secular States, (Baltimore,

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Islam and its idealism have taught democracy. Islam has taught equality, justice and fair play to everybody. What reason is there for anyone to fear democracy, equality, freedom on the highest standard of integrity and on the basis of fair play and justice for everybody?… Let us make it (the future constitution of Pakistan). We shall make it and we shall show it to the world. (Address, Bar Association, Karachi, 25 January 1948) 7 The great majority of us are Muslims. We follow the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him)… But make no mistake: Pakistan is not a theocracy or anything like it. Islam demands from us the tolerance of other creeds and we welcome in closest association with us all those who, of whatever creed, are themselves willing and ready to play their part as true and loyal citizens of Pakistan. (Broadcast talk to the people of Australia, 19 February 1948) 8

Religious elites countered these arguments by highlighting the ubiquitous use of Islam for mobilizing support for Pakistan before 1947 and the speeches of Jinnah promoting the Qurʾan and Sunnah not as the basis of broad guiding principles but as the basis of actual laws: I have one underlying principle in mind, the principle of Muslim democracy. It is my belief that our salvation lies in following the golden rules of conduct set for us by our great lawgiver, the Prophet of Islam. (1948) 9

Everyone, except those who are ignorant, knows that the Quran is the general code of the Muslims. A religious, social, civil, commercial, military, judicial, criminal, penal code; it regulates everything from the ceremonies of religion to those of daily life; from the salvation of the soul to the health of the body; from the rights of all to those of each individual; from Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-E-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Speeches: As Governor-General of Pakistan, 1947–1948, (Islamabad, 1989), p. 125. 8 Ibid., pp. 149–150. 9 Ibid., p. 142. 7

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morality to crime, from punishment here to that in the life to come, and our Prophet has enjoined on us that every Musalman should possess a copy of the Quran and be his own priest. Therefore Islam is not merely confined to the spiritual tenets and doctrines or rituals and ceremonies. It is a complete code regulating the whole Muslim society, every department of life, collective and individually. (Eid message in September 1945) 10

This tussle between the two groups still continues even after the loss of half the country and the passage of sixty-five years. The non-religious elite controlled the levers of power but could not defeat the religious forces because of Pakistan’s religious nationalism and their own mistakes. Islam was the raison d’être of Pakistan and, at least initially, the only thread binding the heterogeneous society. However, over the years, religious forces have drawn more strength from the disunity and incompetence of the national elite.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

The relationship between state and religion has been studied extensively. A few decades earlier, when modernization theory and its attendant secularization thesis were the prevailing orthodoxy, religion was thought to be fading away and hence not worthy of analysis as a potent political force. The west European state model, with its mass secularism and state neutrality, was considered the ideal that sooner or later, other countries would achieve and to which the US was considered an exception. The events of the 1970s, however, exposed the eurocentrism of the modernization theory and secularization thesis. Scholars, since then, have been trying to understand, analyze and possibly model the religion/church-state relationship. Lisa Hajjar has proposed a framework for comparative analysis of Muslim societies to A. G. Noorani, ‘Jinnah’s 11 August, 1947 Speech’, Criterion Quarterly, 5/2 (June 2010). http://www.criterion-quarterly.com/jinnah %E2%80%99s-11-august-1947-speech/. 10

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understand the relationship between laws, religion and the state. 11 She focuses on domestic violence but her framework can be applied more broadly after some minor changes. Her framework expounds on three types of relationships:

Communalization: In this type of relationship, most of the laws are not based on religion. Only the personal status laws are based on religion as the state has allowed different religious communities autonomy in this narrow area. In many Muslim countries communalism prevails. Most laws are based on an erstwhile colonial state’s legal system, while personal status laws are devolved to the religious authorities. Even this distinction between personal status laws and other laws is based on the colonial administration’s decision to leave this area to the ‘natives’ and their religious leaders so as not to offend their religious sensibilities. Religious laws are thus only applicable in personal status space and are communalized (i.e. every religious community has autonomy and is governed by its own laws based on its own religion). Sometimes, laws even differ on the basis of sects.

Theocratization: Some countries consider themselves to be religious states and declare religious law as the state law. Often Islamists (such as the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood) claim that the Qurʾan is their constitution, but there are also countries, such as Saudi Arabia, where it is explicitly written that the Qurʾan and Sunnah (of Prophet) the constitution. 12 In such countries, all laws are promulgated and sanctified on the basis of religion, and religious leaders are very powerful. While there are few countries that fully theocratized in the way that Saudi Arabia or the Vatican, there are many that have high levels of theocratization. Most religious nationalist states are highly theocratized in at least some period of their existence, as their official narrative makes no distinction Lisa Hajjar, ‘Religion, State Power, and Domestic Violence in Muslim Societies: A Framework for Comparative Analysis’, Law & Social Inquiry, 29/1 (2004). 12 Government of Saudi Arabia, ‘Saudi Arabia’s Constitution of 1992 with Amendments through 2005’, Comparative Constitutions Project, 2014. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Saudi_Arabia_2005.pdf. 11

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between state and religion. Large parts of their legal regime derive directly from religious texts and laws are proposed and defended in parliaments sometimes solely on the basis of religion.

Nationalization: This is the intermediate level between communalization and theocratization. Most Muslim countries perhaps fall in this category at the moment. Countries that are in this category usually have a religion and at least some legislation, besides the personal status laws, that is based on religious texts, precepts and principles. However, the main difference with theocratization is that state’s authority is not based on religion. Religious laws can become state laws based on their religious content and utility. However, merely a religious link may not be enough. Religious leaders thus have limited power to influence the state, unless rulers themselves decide to leverage religion. In the case of nationalization, the focus is on state and not on religion.

Hajjar has clearly articulated her framework but has not elucidated how countries move from one category to another. She portrays countries as mainly nationalistic, theocratic or communalized as if these categories are linked to some inherent characteristics that could only be changed under extreme conditions. So, postrevolution Iran is theocratized; India and Nigeria are communalized; and Egypt is nationalistic. However, as this paper will demonstrate, while movement between categories is not easy, it is still frequent, if we encompass the entire history of a country. Using this typology for analyzing Pakistan’s religious nationalism gives one the advantage of demonstrating that nationalism has changed in different eras in Pakistan’s history. Most of the authors, including Hajjar, writing about Pakistan do not show such complexity but a pattern where religion became stronger and stronger and Pakistan moved further away from a ‘modern’ ‘normal’ state. 13 As will be explained below, Pakistan has Besides Hajjar, ‘Religion, State Power, and Domestic Violence in Muslim Societies: A Framework for Comparative Analysis’, other authors that take this view are Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror, (New York, 2005), Ahmad Rashid, 13

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moved from being a communalistic state (with some symbolic relationship with Islam) to a theocratic state and finally became a nationalized state. This paper focuses on the constitutional/legal changes to demonstrate how Pakistan’s nationalism and its relationship with religion have evolved during the last years. The three separate periods (communalistic, theocratic and nationalistic) can be distinguished thusly:

Communalistic State (1947-71) • Model: Western European states • Aim: Modernity. Most problems will be solved once we are modern • Enemies: Religious elite • Question ruling elite asked: Why Pakistan cannot be a modern state?

Theocratic State (1972-99) • Model: Prophet’s State of Medina, Rashidun Caliphate • Aim: Islam. Islam is the solution to all problems • Enemies: Secular elite • Question ruling elite asked: Why Pakistan cannot be Islamic?

Nationalistic State (2000-2014) • Model: None • Aim: State’s greatness. Whatever it takes; modernity, Islam or a combination • Enemies: beholden to foreign powers • Question ruling elite ask: Why Pakistan cannot be Pakistani? Why world cannot let us be what we want?

COMMUNALISTIC STATE (1947–71)

Despite its religious nationalism, Pakistan started as a communalistic state. It was created as a homeland for the Indian Descent into Chaos, (New York 2008), Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, (Washington, D.C, 2005), etc.

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Muslims but in his very first policy statement, founding father Jinnah said: You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other places of worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the State. (Presidential Address to the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan on 11th August, 1947) 14

Support for religious nationalism, however, made national elites vulnerable to attack by the religious right, who started campaigning for the imposition of sharia after independence. To circumvent this pressure, ruling elites responded by coming up with a broad statement on the Islam-state relationship that would be acceptable to most Pakistanis and would not interfere with the (largely nonreligious) ruling elite’s ability to govern. An Objectives Resolution was passed in 1949 by the Constituent Assembly. It proclaimed that sovereignty of the entire universe belongs to Allah and state of Pakistan was using authority delegated by Him. It also stated that Muslims would be able to live their lives according to the Qurʾan and Sunnah. But it also declared that Pakistan would be a democracy where fundamental rights would be guaranteed and minorities could practice their religions/cultures and their legitimate interests would be safeguarded. 15 The Objectives Resolution is often considered to be the basis of the later Islamization/theocratization of Pakistan. However, as is clear, it had seeds of both Islamization and modernization. It combined both Islamic symbolism, as well as democracy and fundamental rights. It was a document of compromise and its language was deliberately vague and imprecise. 16 To understand the true intent of the ruling elite, one has to examine whether there was M. A. Jinnah, Quaid-E-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Speeches, p. 46. Sharif Al-Mujahid, Ideological Foundations of Pakistan, (Islamabad, 2012), pp. 161–2. 16 Tasneem Kausar, ‘Religion, Politics and the Dilemma of National Identity in Pakistan’, in Islam, Law and Identity, Eds. Marinos Diamantides, Adam Gearey, (New York, 2012). 14 15

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a change to colonial laws after the passage of this resolution. Upon examination, it is clear there was not much change to such laws or the constitution. In fact, Pakistan continued to be governed by the British India Act (1935) until 1956, seven years after the passage of this resolution. Penal laws also did not see much change. Communalization that was operative before independence, continued. Three things influenced the ruling elite’s decision to continue with communalization and to make only symbolic commitments to Islam: • British legacy of non-interference • Lack of knowledge about Islam • Religious diversity within Pakistan

The vast majority of the Pakistan’s national elite, whether political, administrative or military, was educated at or had worked for British institutions. British colonial policy, at least after 1857 War of Independence, was not to interfere with people’s religion unless it was absolutely necessary. Queen Victoria’s 1858 proclamation assuming direct control of all British subjects decreed: We declare it to be our royal will and pleasure that none be in any wise favoured, none molested or disquieted, by reason of their religious faith or observances, but that all shall alike enjoy the equal and impartial protection of the law; and we strictly charge and enjoin all those who may be in authority under us that they abstain from all interference with the religious belief or worship of any of our subjects on pain of our highest displeasure. 17

The Pakistani elite, because of their British training and influence, preferred to continue this policy. Another reason for not nationalizing religion was their lack of knowledge about Islam. They did not have sufficient knowledge about the theological or sectarian debates which they would have to confront had they tried Her Majesty’s Government, ‘Proclamation by the Queen to the Princes, Chiefs, and the People of India’, 1858. http://www.sdstate.edu/ projectsouthasia/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&PageID=861653 17

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to base legislation on Islam. As they understood, such actions would mean giving power to the religious elite, whom they disliked. Finally, because of sectarian differences, it was difficult to come up with laws that would be acceptable to all Pakistanis. As later events showed, legislation based on religious injunctions during General Zia’s rule (1977–88) did result in sectarianism and conflict. The policy adopted in the Objectives Resolution continued in the first constitution of Pakistan, promulgated in 1956. Broad Islamic principles were supported but nothing substantial was given to religious elite. Besides the Objectives Resolution, which became the prologue of the constitution, there were some Islaminspired clauses but most of them were broad and symbolic. For example, the country was named the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and only a Muslim could become head of the state. Moreover, though legally not enforceable, in the preamble of the constitution and in the directive principles of state policy, governments were required to promote Islamic precepts and education. Another article (Article 197) called for the formation of an organization for Islamic research. The most important and enforceable provision was given in Article 198, which stated that no law contrary to the injunctions of the Qurʾan and Sunnah shall be enacted and existing laws shall be brought into conformity with such injunctions. However, the way Article 198 was written was important. It did not say that all laws shall be according to the injunctions of the Qurʾan and Sunnah because this would place the burden of proving every law was in accordance with the Qurʾan and Sunnah on the government. The way it was worded instead put the burden of proof that a specific law is unIslamic on the complainant. As there are few specifics given in the Qurʾan and Sunnah, proving that any given law was repugnant to them was difficult. The 1956 Constitution did not last long and was abrogated by General Ayub Khan after he imposed martial law in 1958. General Khan had watched the political elite closely during the previous eleven years and was not amused by the actions of the religious leaders. In a speech to the ulema, he cajoled them to leave obscurantism and interpret religion in ways that would help the

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country’s development and its fight against communism. 18 He was not afraid to confront them and decided to forgo the principle of communalization and legislated on personal status laws. Two ordinances promulgated in early 1960s clarified the direction of the regime. It wanted to enter into the sphere that religious elite considered sacrosanct and out of reach of the ruling elite since at least 1857. By promulgating the Aukaf Ordinance in 1960, Ayub tried to break the power of the pirs/sajada nasheens (usually hereditary religious leaders) by taking away their lands and other financial endowments. 19 In a bigger blow to the religious elite, Ayub promulgated the Muslim Family Law Ordinance (MFLO) in 1961. It put restrictions on polygamy and divorce, and made changes in the traditionally accepted rules regarding inheritance, dower and alimony. The 1962 constitution then sealed the deal. Ayub diluted the Islam-inspired clauses of the 1956 constitution in the new constitution. The following changes were made: •

•

•

In the 1962 constitution, the name of the country was changed from the Islamic Republic of Pakistan to the Republic of Pakistan;

The 1962 constitution removed the phrase ‘within the limits prescribed by Him’ from the following clause in the preamble, ‘Whereas sovereignty over the entire Universe belongs to Allah Almighty alone, and the authority to be exercised by the people of Pakistan within the limits prescribed by Him as a sacred trust’, thereby giving legislators more leeway to make laws. Similarly, references to the (Holy) Qurʾan and Sunnah in many articles of the 1956 constitution were replaced simply with ‘Islam’.

Vali R. Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamaʿat-I Islami of Pakistan, (Berkeley, 1994), p. 150. 19 S. Jamal Malik, ‘Waqf in Pakistan: Change in Traditional Institutions’, Die Welt Des Islams, 30, 1/4 (1990). 18

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The 1962 constitution, unlike that of 1956, had no provision to bring existing laws in conformity with the Qurʾan and Sunnah.

This additional flexibility was later utilized by the Islamic Research Institute, which had been created in 1960 but became a constitutional body in 1962. The objectives of the Institute demonstrate Khan’s desire: •

•

•

•

To define Islam in terms of its fundamentals in a rational and liberal manner and to emphasize, among others, the basic Islamic ideals of universal brotherhood, tolerance and social justice;

To interpret the teachings of Islam in such a way as to bring out its dynamic character in the context of the intellectual and scientific progress of the modern world;

To carry out research in the contribution of Islam to thought, science and culture with a view to enabling the Muslims to recapture eminent positions in these fields;

To take appropriate measures for organizing and encouraging research in Islamic history, philosophy, law and jurisprudence, etc. 20

He invited an accomplished scholar of Islamic philosophy and Jurisprudence, Dr. Fazal-ur-Rehman, to head this institute. Fazalur-Rehman was a modernist and so was suitable to deliver on the above-mentioned objectives. Both the MFLO and Fazal-ur-Rehman’s work were severely criticized by the ulema and the constitutional changes were rescinded, but Khan forged ahead, ignoring the criticism. However, his authority was compromised after the stalemate/loss in the 1965 war with India and he had to drop his project of modernizing Islam. The policy of communalization was revived and there were no additional changes to personal status laws. However, earlier Government of Pakistan, ‘Establishment of Central Institute of Islamic Research’, March 10, 1960. http://iri.iiu.edu.pk/uploads/ Notification-1960.pdf. 20

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changes were not discarded and remained applicable, despite the efforts and protests of the religious elite.

THEOCRATIC STATE (1972–99)

The ruling elite remained in control during the first period and, despite Pakistan’s religious nationalism, was ready to collaborate with the religious elite only on their (ruling elite’s) own terms. There was no intention of sharing any power with the religious elites, who were generally considered a nuisance. However, with Ayub’s fall, cataclysmic changes occurred. The military elite, in an attempt to retain power and ward off a united attack by the politicians, decided to ally with the religious elite. Generals saw that this alliance also had the additional benefit of leveraging religious rhetoric, mobilization and cadres to be used against their archrival, India. The religious elite that had found no traction for more than two decades also found it advantageous to have the support of at least one powerful section of the ruling elite. Thus started the theocratization of Pakistan. Use of religion as a basis of laws to achieve political objectives started after 1972 but one of the early signs of the trend were the martial law regulations in July 1969, issued just a few months after the military takeover. Martial Law Regulation No. 51 prescribed a maximum penalty of seven years’ rigorous imprisonment for any person who published, or was in possession of, any book, pamphlet, etc. that was offensive to the religion of Islam. The vagueness of the charge meant that it could be used against anyone and the main targets were the popular leftof-the-center politicians. 21 The loss of half the country in the 1971 War, with around 90,000 prisoners of war in Indian jails, was a devastating event and led to introspection, deep reflection and reorientation. Pakistanis wanted answers but there were few. The report of the Hamood-urRehman Commission, established to investigate the reasons for the H. Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, pp. 56–7, and Mehmal Sarfaraz, ‘Religious Extremism in Pakistan (Part XIII)’, Megalomaniac, July 28, 2007. http://mehmal.blogspot.com/2007/07/ jawaharlal-nehru-died-in-1964.html. 21

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debacle, was kept secret because it implicated both the civilian and military elites. In the absence of this report, the religious elite delivered the one consistent message that Pakistanis heard. Religious leaders and parties argued that this catastrophe came because the ruling elite reneged on the promise made to the people and to God in 1947 that Pakistan would be an Islamic state. Many Pakistanis were susceptible to this message for the following reasons: • •

•

•

A new generation socialized in religious nationalism was ready to accept a more sectarian political discourse;

Knowledge of General Yahya’s unIslamic ways was in the public domain and helped substantiate the charge that a Westernized, unIslamic, secular leadership had led Pakistan to disaster;

‘Hindu’ India’s role in the creation of Bangladesh was highlighted to hide mistakes by the Pakistani elite that were the main reasons behind the events of 1971. The following statement by the Indian Prime Minister after the loss of East Pakistan provided evidence for the notion that it was a war between Islam and Hinduism rather than between India and Pakistan, ‘Today, we have taken the revenge of one thousand years’ slavery and the birth of Bangladesh is the death of the Two Nations Theory’. 22

Even after 1971, religious socialization continued as Pakistan’s ethnic and religious diversity decreased after the separation of East Pakistan. For instance, Pakistan’s Muslim majority became more pronounced as most Hindus, living in East Pakistan, now belonged to a separate country. Islam became a more useful tool to unite Pakistanis.

So, religious nationalism got a fillip after 1971. Vali Nasr explains:

As quoted in Aslam Syed, ‘Dynamics of Religion and Politics in South Asia’, in The Dynamics of Cultural Counterpoint in Asian Studies, Eds. David Jones, Michele Marion, (Albany, 2014). 22

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The inability of Islam to keep the two halves of the country united had not diminished the appeal of religion either to politicians or the people. Oddly enough it even increased it. The precariousness of Pakistan’s unity led Pakistanis to reaffirm their Islamic roots. Even the avowedly secularist and left-of-center People’s Party government did not remain immune and talked of ‘re-Islamizing’ the country. 23

The new constitution promulgated in 1973 was, therefore, more Islamic than the previous two constitutions in the following ways: • •

•

Islam, for the first time, was declared the state religion;

In addition to prohibitions on becoming President, nonMuslims could also not become Prime Minister of the country;

The declaration in the 1956 constitution that all existing laws shall be made to conform to the Holy Qurʾan and Sunnah and no new law shall be enacted which is repugnant to their injunctions, was again part of constitution.

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, 24 the new leader, although personally nonreligious, tried to placate religious sentiments. He gave more importance to religion in the new constitution, coined the term ‘Islamic socialism’ for his economic policy, and used the slogan, ‘Islam is our Religion; Democracy is our Politics; Socialism is our Economy’. He was also forced to use religious rhetoric and imagery to improve Pakistan’s dire economic condition after 1971. He had to maintain very cordial relations with the Arab Islamic countries (particularly Saudi Arabia), as they gave aid to Pakistan and also employed millions of Pakistanis. In turn, Bhutto supported these countries in the international arena and promoted Islamic symbolism. One of the expressions of this symbolism was the V. R. Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, pp. 170–1. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was the father of Benazir Bhutto. Benazir Bhutto twice served as Pakistan’s Prime Minister in late eighties and midnineties. Both led the same political party, the Pakistan People’s Party. 23 24

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convening of an Islamic countries’ conference in Lahore in 1974. This rhetoric, symbolism and his authoritarian actions, soon put him on the defensive and he had to accept religious parties’ demands. Dreams of an Islamic socialist state gave way to a theocratic state. Bhutto caved under pressure and accepted the following demands of the religious elite: • • • •

Declaring Ahmadis, a sect, to be non-Muslims;

Bans on gambling, horse racing, and alcohol as unIslamic activities;

Declaring Friday the weekly holiday;

Mandatory Qurʾanic studies for all students.

These changes did not help Bhutto and he was ousted by the military after large protests against his rule. Religion was the rallying cry in these protests, and even mainstream opposition parties went along. General Zia, who led the coup against Bhutto in 1977, was the first ruler of Pakistan who openly courted a religious constituency and equated his rule with Islam. While theocratization was, to some extent, forced on Bhutto, Zia was a believer. Soon after taking power, he said: Pakistan, which was created in the name of Islam, will continue to survive only if it sticks to Islam… I consider the introduction of the Islamic system as an essential prerequisite for the country. 25

He presented himself as an Islamic warrior and painted his enemies as enemies of Islam. After becoming army chief, he symbolically changed the army’s focus by changing its motto to ‘Iman, Taqwa, Jihad-e-fi-Sabilillah’ (Faith, fear of Allah, struggle/jihad for Allah). 26 But perhaps the best example of his use of Islam was the question Jocelyne Cesari, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State, (New York, 2014), p. 200. 26 Daniel S. Markey, No Exit from Pakistan: America’s Tortured Relationship with Islamabad, (New York, 2013), p. 49. 25

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he asked in a dubious referendum in 1984 to get himself elected president. The question was, ‘Do you endorse the process initiated by General Mohammed Zia ul Haq, the President of Pakistan, to bring in laws in conformity with the injunctions of Islam as laid down in the Holy Koran and Sunnah of the Holy Prophet (peace be upon him) and for the preservation of the ideology of Pakistan?’ An affirmative answer by someone to this loaded question meant that the general would get their endorsement to rule for five more years as President of Pakistan. 27 If the theocratization project was started under Bhutto, under General Zia, it reached its culmination. He linked all his actions, administrative decrees and legislation to Islam even when his use of Islam was selective and cynical, as Abbas explains: …the raison detre of the regime, the ‘Islamization’ of Pakistan proceeded apace. The major focus of this was ‘regulative, punitive, and extractive’. Very little attempt was made to project other aspects of Islam, that is, social and economic egalitarianism and accountability of those in power… 28

Theocratization became a reality by the legal/constitutional changes General Zia made during his eleven years in power. Some of the more significant changes included: • •

• •

Objectives Resolution was made a substantive part of the constitution;

Constitutional changes to the judiciary, including the creation of Shariat Benches in the Superior Courts in 1979 and a Federal Shariat Court in 1980; Hudud Ordinance of 1979;

Zakat and Ushr Ordinance of 1980;

Owen Bennet-Jones, ‘Analysis: Musharraf’s Referendum Gamble’, BBC, April 5, 2002, sec. South Asia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_ asia/1913990.stm 28 Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism, p. 103. 27

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Ehteram-e-Ramadan (Respect of Ramadan) Ordinance in 1981;

Changes made to various laws to enable an interest-free banking system in the early 1980s;

Qanun-e-Shahadat (Law of Evidence) Order of 1984;

Blasphemy laws made more stringent, with severe punishments, in the 1980s.

Besides these legal changes, numerous administrative changes were also made. One such change was appointment of around 100,000 prayer wardens to persuade people to say prayers (the Nizam-eSalat campaign in early 1980s). Hundreds of madrassas were also established to provide religious and military training to Pakistanis and others to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. 29 Public education was ‘Islamized’ and mass media was used as an apologia for militarism, thus socializing a new generation in an environment of increasing regulative and aggressive Islam, and creating a theocratic state. Not surprisingly, these measures resulted in highlighting the differences between sects and sectarianism, for the first time in Pakistan’s history, became an issue. With the added problems of militancy and the easy availability of weapons and training, courtesy of the Afghan war, hundreds of people were killed in fighting between rival sects in the 1990s. 30 The state increasingly came to be known as an ally of the Deobandi, Salafi and Wahhabi sects as these sects supported the Afghan War and insurgency in Indiancontrolled areas of Kashmir at the behest of Pakistan’s military. After General Zia’s death in 1988, the theocratization process continued but at a slower pace. The restoration of democracy did not change the situation as democratic governments changed Akmal Hussain, ‘Pakistan’s Economy in Historical Perspective: Growth, Power and Poverty’, in Pakistan: The Struggle Within, Ed. John Wilson, (New Delhi, 2009). 30 Vali R. Nasr, ‘International Politics, Domestic Imperatives, and Identity Mobilization: Sectarianism in Pakistan, 1979–1998’, Comparative Politics, 32/2 (2002). 29

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frequently and the military dominated the political scene and the military-mullah 31 alliance that started with Yahya continued to strengthen. 32 The following Islam-inspired acts and amendments were passed or proposed during this ostensibly democratic era: • • •

Qisas and Diyat Ordinance was proposed in 1990. It became law in 1997; Enforcement of Sharia Act in 1991;

Draft 15th Constitutional Amendment in 1998 (passed by the National Assembly)

NATIONALISTIC STATE (1999–2014)

As in the case of policy change from communalization to theocratization, several factors contributed to change of policy Mullah is generally used as a derogatory term for a Muslim religious leader. 32 It may be pertinent to comment here on Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI is often referred to as an independent (even rogue) agency within the Pakistani state, making its own decisions. This view is mistaken. While the ISI is the main perpetrator of the, often unconstitutional, political activities of Pakistan’s military and its operations in Afghanistan (and elsewhere) since the 1970s, it is merely a ‘conduit’, so blaming it for such activities does not serve much purpose. The ISI is commanded by a serving general and most of its employees are serving military officers, who are transferred to the ISI for an assignment of usually three years (they then go back to their regular military jobs). The ISI is, therefore, not only commanded by a general but also has no permanent employees, except the civilian employees that serve at lower levels and never become part of the top decision-making group. For most ISI employees, the institutional loyalty is not to the ISI, but to the Pakistani military. In short, the ISI is essentially a departments or directorate of the Pakistani military and is firmly integrated into the Pakistani military’s structure. There will always be some ISI officers who exceed or go against the orders of the top management, as happens in all intelligence agencies, but the vast majority follows the overall vision defined for their organization by the Pakistani military’s chief. 31

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from theocratization to nationalization. There was a realization in the ruling military elite that continuing their policies unabated was not possible due to increasing costs. The punitive, sectarian and militaristic Islam that they had promoted had not helped them in achieving their goals of either bringing India to the negotiating table to discuss Kashmir or having a friendly government in Afghanistan, though they have dominated domestic politics using their Islamist militant allies. The start of a new millennium coincided with the start of a nationalistic state due for the following reasons. After the nuclear tests (in May 1998), the Kargil war with India (from May-July 1999), and the declaration of martial law (in October 1999), the international reputation of the Pakistani military was in tatters. Domestic pressure also increased as generals were now de jure rulers and could not hide behind a powerless civilian facade, while making disastrous decisions. General Pervez Musharraf’s non-religious lifestyle and outlook also contributed to the change. He openly admitted that his ideal leader was Kemal Ataturk, the Turkish leader who brutally imposed secularism. Finally, the September 11 attacks forced Pakistan’s military to degrade its support for Islamist rhetoric, socialization and militancy. Two slogans or policy initiatives of General Musharraf – ‘Pakistan First’ and ‘Enlightened Moderation’ – demonstrated the abandonment of theocratization and adoption of nationalization. The ‘Pakistan First’ policy meant that the global, pan-Islamic entanglements of the 1980s and 1990s were a thing of past. Second, the focus would be on Pakistan; on its preservation and on its development. Policies would be selected on the basis of whether they were good for Pakistan or not. Other criteria used in the past, such as the promotion of Islam, would not be used. 33 ‘Enlightened Moderation’, as General Musharraf himself explained, was a twopronged strategy: The first part is for the Muslim world to shun militancy and extremism and adopt the path of socioeconomic uplift. The

T. Kausar, ‘Religion, Politics and the Dilemma of National Identity in Pakistan’, pp. 203–6. 33

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second is for the West, and the United States in particular, to seek to resolve all political disputes with justice and to aid in the socioeconomic betterment of the deprived Muslim world… We have a glorious past. Islam exploded on the world scene as the flag bearer of a just, lawful, tolerant and valueoriented society. We had faith in human exaltation through knowledge and enlightenment. We exemplified tolerance within ourselves and toward people of other faiths. 34

Musharraf was not rejecting Islam but the focus was now this world, instead of the next world. Islam was to be the state religion but not the basis of Pakistan. General Musharraf, like General Zia, also used a controversial rigged referendum to get himself elected President for five years. The question asked, however, demonstrates how things had changed. The focus was not on creating an Islamic state but on Pakistan: For the survival of the local government system, establishment of democracy, continuity of reforms, end to sectarianism and extremism, and to fulfil the vision of Quaid-e-Azam, would you like to elect President General Pervez Musharraf as president of Pakistan for five years? 35

Under nationalization, friends became enemies and enemies became friends. The religious elite’s protests were ignored and women and minorities were given rights and Islamization/theocratization was scaled back. The following legal and administrative changes show how far Pakistan had moved from theocratization: •

Killing and capturing of hundreds of Taliban, including many top leaders, after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the registration of madrassas;

Pervez Musharraf, ‘A Plea for Enlightened Moderation’, The Washington Post, June 1, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ articles/A5081-2004May31.html. 35 ‘Q&A: Pakistan Referendum’, BBC, May 2, 2002, sec. South Asia. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1958219.stm. 34

12. PAKISTAN’S RELIGIOUS NATIONALISM • • • •

•

365

Introduction of a joint electorate in 2002, granting dual votes to minorities; Increase of seats reserved for women at the local, provincial and national level (2001–2); Opening of freer electronic media, with few religious restrictions;

The Women Protection Law of 2006 and an increase in the quota for women in the state bureaucracy from 5% to 10%; Military action against some militant groups in the tribal areas and ending infiltration into Indian-controlled Kashmir (2003–8).

The strategies had positive effects but Musharraf and Pakistan’s military had no intention of pursuing them to logical conclusion: rejection of all militancy and religious extremism. The best allies of Musharraf in combating extremism and militancy were the two mainstream popular parties, the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League, Nawaz (PML-N). However, in the 2002 elections, the military regime restricted the campaigns of these parties and allowed religious parties to win a provincial election for the first time in the history of Pakistan. The regime then cut deals with the religious parties to give them more concessions in lieu of its own undemocratic actions. The regime also didn’t sever its links with some Taliban factions and militants fighting India. The problems with religion-inspired Hudud Ordinance and blasphemy laws that negatively affected women and minorities were also not rectified despite assurances. The above discussion demonstrates that the new policy was nationalization, though religious-inspired legislation was decreasing but still not limited to only personal status laws. The restoration of democracy in 2008 moved Pakistan further in the direction of nationalization. The democratic governments moved further to protect human rights and to accommodate women and minorities, two groups victimized in the 1980s and 1990s under theocratic regimes. The follow actions reflect this: •

Right to information, education and free trade were made fundamental constitutional rights (in 2010);

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•

• •

In the Objectives Resolution, the word ‘freely’ was added to the following sentence: ‘Wherein adequate provision shall be made for the minorities to freely profess and practice their religions and develop their cultures’;

Enactment of many pro-women laws (Pakistan’s Sexual Harassment Act of 2010, The Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Act of 2011, The Prevention of AntiWomen Practices (Criminal Law Amendment) Act of 2011, The Women in Distress and Detention Fund of 2011 and the National Commission on the Status of Women Act in 2012); 36

National Commission for Human Rights Act of 2012;

Numerous pro-minorities measures and laws (such as the Celebration of National Minorities Day (enacted in 2009), the establishment of a 5% quota for minorities in public sector employment in 2009 and the Supreme Court comprehensive judgment on minority rights in 2014). 37

The above-mentioned legislation is important but what is conspicuous, because of its absence, is religion-inspired legislation. The religious right has managed to hold onto its many victories of the 1980s and 1990s, but it has no new triumphs to celebrate during the last fifteen years. If there is a trend, it is that the theocratic state is gradually being chipped away. The nationalization trend has continued under military, left-of-center PPP and right-of-center PML-N governments, so it is endorsed by all the powerful political forces in Pakistan. Nationalization policy has been strengthened by the fear, some call it paranoia, ordinary and elite Pakistanis have acquired during the last decade. They are extremely afraid of outsiders (and insiders on a foreign payroll) damaging or destroying their UN Women, ‘Pro-Women Laws Take Hold in Pakistan’, UNWomen, March 26, 2012. http://www.unwomen.org/en/news/ stories/2012/3/pro-women-laws-take-hold-in-pakistan. 37 Chief Justice Tassaduq H. Jillani, ‘Supreme Court Judgment Regarding Minorities’ Rights’, Supreme Court of Pakistan, June 19, 2014. 36

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country. 38 Dangers to Pakistan are the constant focus. Gone are the days when they considered themselves as the vanguard of global Islamic forces that had defeated a superpower (i.e., the USSR in Afghanistan). The recent killing of more than hundred and thirty children in a Peshawar school by Taliban forces on 16 December 2014 39 moved Pakistan further away from theocratization (and strengthened nationalization), as the Taliban have become a despised symbol of theocratization in Pakistan. The major change was the passage of the 21st amendment to the constitution. For the first time, this amendment linked religious extremism directly to terrorism, despite the vociferous objections of the religious right. 40 The amendment allowed the establishment of military courts to try terrorists. It was clearly mentioned that this amendment is specifically meant for groups and individuals, ‘who claims, or is known, to belong to any terrorist group or organization using the name of religion or a sect.’ Related changes in the Army Act also explicitly and solely target religious extremism. 41 Moreover, the Steve Coll, Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 2009. blog.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/CollSFRCTestimony.pdf and Sher Ali Khan, ‘Pakistan or Paranoidistan?’, The Tiger’s Lair, May 3, 2010. http://tigerali.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/pakistan-or-paranoidist an/. 39 Exactly forty-three years after Pakistani forces surrendered to Indian forces in East Pakistan. 40 Amir Mir, ‘JUI, JI sided with dictators, but oppose military courts’, The News, January 7, 2015. 41 In terms of Pakistan’s democratic development, however, the 21st Amendment was a major setback. It has increased the role of a powerful military that already held enormous power. Not surprisingly, this amendment has been termed a ‘soft coup’. In addition, this amendment setup a parallel judiciary (military courts), where the accused has limited constitutional and legal rights. See Farooq Yousaf, “Pakistan’s 21st amendment: national consensus or soft coup?”, Opendemocracy, January 6, 2015. https://www.opendemocracy.net/open-security/farooq-yousaf/ pakistan%E2%80%99s-21st-amendment-national-consensus-or-softcoup. 38

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national action plan announced after the tragedy includes restrictions on the funding of madrassas, restrictions on hate literature being distributed by many religious organizations, action against sectarian outfits, and action to stop extremism and protect religious minorities. 42

CONCLUSION

Pakistan is one of the most fascinating countries in which to study the relationship between Islam and nationalism as its nationalism is not adulterated with ethno-linguistic affinity. Like Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia are both religious nationalist states but ethnolinguistic attachments play a significant part in their nationalism and so it is difficult to discriminate the real contribution of Islam to nationalism. The usual story of Pakistan’s religious nationalism, by both Pakistani and international experts, is that it has been increasing in its strength since independence and any change in Pakistan’s ruling elite’s behavior, both domestically and internationally, would require a change in religious nationalism. However, as the above discussion shows, religious nationalism has not stopped Pakistan in its short history to adopt policies of communalization, theocratization and nationalization. Moreover, the rise of a particular type of religious nationalism that was theocratic and sectarian ended, Pakistan has moved further and further away from theocratization. This trajectory appears sustainable, as terrorism by Taliban extremists (who seek to set up a theocratic Islamic state in Pakistan) has severely damaged the cause of theocratization. After losing around fifty thousand Pakistanis in the fight against terrorism, there are few groups left that support Taliban actions. The religious parties that supported theocratization have never won even ten percent of the vote in a free national election in Pakistan. Their support is declining further Anup Kaphle, ‘Pakistan Announces a National Plan to Fight Terrorism, Says Terrorists’ Days Are Numbered’, The Washington Post, December 24, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ worldviews/wp/2014/12/24/pakistan-announces-a-national-plan-tofight-terrorism-says-terrorists-days-are-numbered/. 42

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if one looks at the 2008 and 2013 national elections results. The foremost reason for the continuation of nationalization is, however, the vitiation of the military-mullah alliance. This alliance that started in early 1970s was the one of main reasons for theocratization.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hassan Abbas, Pakistan’s Drift into Extremism: Allah, the Army, and America’s War on Terror, (New York, 2005). Tamer Balci, ‘From Nationalization of Islam to Islamization of Nation: Clash of Islam and Secular Nationalism in the Middle East’, presented at the ISA 2008, (San Francisco, 2008). BBC, ‘Q&A: Pakistan Referendum’, BBC, 2 May 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1958219.stm, accessed 30 December 2014. Owen Bennet-Jones, ‘Analysis: Musharraf’s Referendum Gamble’, BBC, 5 April 2002. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1913990.stm, accessed 27 December 2014. ———, Pakistan: Eye of the Storm, (New Haven, 2003). Steve Bruce, Politics and Religion, (Cambridge, UK, 2003). Jocelyne Cesari, The Awakening of Muslim Democracy: Religion, Modernity, and the State, (New York, 2014). Steve Coll, Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, (2009), blog.newyorker.com/online/blogs/stevecoll/CollSFRCTesti mony.pdf, accessed 27 December 2014. Government of Pakistan, ‘Establishment of Central Institute of Islamic Research’, (1960) http://iri.iiu.edu.pk/uploads/Notification-1960.pdf, accessed 26 December 2014. Government of Saudi Arabia, ‘Saudi Arabia’s Constitution of 1992 with Amendments through 2005’, Comparative Constitutions Project, (2014) https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Saudi_Arabia _2005.pdf, accessed 27 December 2014. Lisa Hajjar, ‘Religion, State Power, and Domestic Violence in Muslim Societies: A Framework for Comparative Analysis’,

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Law & Social Inquiry, 29 (2004). Husain Haqqani, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military, (Washington, D.C, 2005). Her Majesty’s Government, “Proclamation by the Queen to the Princes, Chiefs, and the People of India”, 1858 http://www.sdstate.edu/projectsouthasia/loader.cfm?csModu le=security/getfile&PageID=861653, accessed 29 December 2014. Scott W. Hibbard, Religious Politics and Secular States, (Baltimore, 2010). Akmal Hussain, ‘Pakistan’s Economy in Historical Perspective: Growth, Power and Poverty’, in Pakistan: The Struggle Within, Ed. John Wilson (Delhi, 2009). Chief Justice Tassaduq H Jillani, ‘Supreme Court Judgment Regarding Minorities’ Rights’, (Islamabad, 2014), http://www.supremecourt.gov.pk/web/user_files/File/smc_ 1_2014.pdf, accessed 24 December 2014. Mohammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-E-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah Speeches: As Governor-General of Pakistan, 1947–1948, (Lahore, 1989). Anup Kaphle, ‘Pakistan Announces a National Plan to Fight Terrorism, Says Terrorists Days Are Numbered’, The Washington Post, 24 December (2014), http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/201 4/12/24/pakistan-announces-a-national-plan-to-fightterrorism-says-terrorists-days-are-numbered/, accessed 25 December 2014. Tasneem Kausar, ‘Religion, Politics and the Dilemma of National Identity in Pakistan’, in Islam, Law and Identity, Ed. Marinos Diamantides, Adam Gearey, (Oxon, 2012). Sher Ali Khan, ‘Pakistan or Paranoidistan?’, The Tiger’s Lair, (2010) http://tigerali.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/pakistan-orparanoidistan/, accessed 31 December 2014. Sumera Khan, ‘Women-Specific Bills Passed: Fourteen-Year Jail Term for Acid-Throwers’, The Express Tribune, 12 December (2011). S. Jamal Malik, ‘Waqf in Pakistan: Change in Traditional

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Institutions’, Die Welt des Islams, 30 (1990). Daniel S. Markey, No Exit from Pakistan: America’s Tortured Relationship with Islamabad, (New York, 2013). Amir Mir, ‘JUI, JI sided with dictators, but oppose military courts’, The News, 7 January (2015). Sharif Al Mujahid, Ideological Foundations of Pakistan, (Islamabad, 2012). Muhammad Munir, Talaq and the Muslim Family Law Ordinance, 1961 in Pakistan: An Analysis, (Rochester, NY, 2011), http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1925704, accessed 26 December 2014. Pervez Musharraf, ‘A Plea for Enlightened Moderation’, The Washington Post, 1 June (2004), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50812004May31.html, accessed 27 December 2014. Vali R. Nasr, The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jamaʿat-I Islami of Pakistan, (Berkeley, 1994). ———, ‘International Politics, Domestic Imperatives, and Identity Mobilization: Sectarianism in Pakistan, 1979–1998’, Comparative Politics, 32 (2000). A. G. Noorani, ‘Jinnah’s 11 August, 1947 Speech’, Criterion Quarterly, 5 (2010), http://www.criterion-quarterly.com/jinnah%E2%80%99s-11august-1947-speech/, accessed 1 January 2015. Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, Revised edition, (New York, 2009). Mehmal Sarfaraz, ‘Religious Extremism in Pakistan (Part XIII)’, Megalomaniac, (2007), http://mehmal.blogspot.com/2007/07/jawaharlal-nehrudied-in-1964.html, accessed 28 December 2014. Anna Marisa Schön, ‘The Construction of Turkish National Identity: Nationalization of Islam & Islamization of Nationhood’, (Tilburg University, 2013), http://productie.gx.uvt.nl/upload/4a61e225-9a7a-4c58-a55cdc711ca52b44_Anna%20Marisa%20Schoen%20%20The%20Construction%20of%20Turkish%20National%2

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13. THE LIMITS OF SECULAR NATIONALISM: REVISITING THE POLITICS OF ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH HUMAYUN KABIR 1 Today, liberal Bangladeshis feel increasingly embattled. Many are convinced that Islamism is growing dangerously, even while liberal Bangladeshis forms a vibrant, feisty and vocal community with ever stronger global links. The further Islamisation of Bangladesh society is by no means a foregone conclusion, but nor is further secularization. The jury is still out on what new twist the youngest generation in the delta will give to that old hyphenated identity: BengaliMuslim. 2

INTRODUCTION

For a renewed scholarly interest in the incommensurable relationship between, and a never ending debate on, religion and nationalism, South Asia is prominent not just for the historicalreligious divide of one political entity into two – India and Pakistan Dr. Kabir is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science & Sociology School of Humanities and Social Sciences, North South University Bashundhara, Bangladesh. 2 Willem V. Schendel, A History of Bangladesh, (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 262–263. 1

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– but also because religion remains “one of the defining elements in the politics of belonging and identity” in the postcolonial nationstates of the region. 3 Bangladesh, the newest nation-state and once an annexed part of the undivided Pakistan (1947–1971), represents a peculiar case on the relationship between nationalism and religion for her two different, but paradoxical, historical-political conjectures. First, the Bengali-Muslims 4 took a dual route in their historical journey of national struggle since the decolonization of the Indian subcontinent. They helped spearhead the political theory of religious nationalism, primarily championed by the northwestern and north-central Indian Urdu-speaking Muslim political elites, in the formation of Pakistan; later, they reversed course in the wake of an emerging nationalism on the basis of a linguisticcultural, regional, and non-communal political doctrine that undermined the integrative paradigm of Pakistani Muslim nationhood. Second, the cultural-linguistic Bengali nationalist spirit, which many contend to be secular in nature, primarily emerged against the exploitative regimes of West Pakistani bureaucraticmilitary, Urdu-speaking political elites, as a ‘logical outcome of a situation where Bengalis were being oppressed in the name of religion’ 5 had been thwarted by a heightened visibility of religion (Islam) in the state’s principles, national identity, and political lives that tended to redefine and reconstruct national imagination in the years after independence. Thus, the search for a national identity has always been contentious in post-independence Bangladeshi society, in which the contention is drawn primarily from two opposite paradigms: the secular, rooted in its nationalistic Peter van der Veer, ‘Religion in South Asia’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (2002), p. 184. 4 The term is widely used in academic scholarship referring to simultaneous adherence to both Islamic and Bengali culture of the Muslim people in Bangladesh. See, Asim Roy, ‘Impact of Islamic Revival and Reform in Colonial Bengal and Bengal Muslim Identity: A Revisit’, South Asia, 22, special issue (1999), p. 73. 5 Amena A. Mohsin, ‘Religion, Politics and Security: The Case of Bangladesh’, in Religious Radicalism and Security in South Asia, Eds. Satu P. Limaye, Robert G. Wirsing, Mohan Malik, (Honolulu, 2004), p. 471. 3

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 375 aspiration and struggle against Pakistan’s religious nationalism, and the religious, re-emerged in a new form particularly in the late 1970s, as we will see in our discussion later. This ‘liberal’ and ‘religious right’ framework continues to dominate the political as well as cultural divide in contemporary Bangladeshi society as illustrated in Schendel’s contention in the above and in other scholars’ work (see Rashiduzzaman 1994, 1997). The divide between the two powerful discourses – secular and religious – had been routed from, and intricately associated with, the history of colonial encounter and modernity in South Asia in which nationalism, one of ‘Europe’s most magnificent gifts to the rest of the world,’ 6 had been discursively formed, constructed, and adapted as a universal and emancipatory political doctrine replicable with its secular origin. In contrast, religion, as a cultural domain, has always been unwelcomed in the state’s affairs and nationalistic aspiration for its antithesis to the progress and advancement followed by modern (secular) nationalism. This binary construction of secular and religious nationalism is analogous to the normative nature of modernity as a universalistic and emancipatory project, and tradition as a parochial and exploitative phenomenon. If secular and religious nationalism are conceived in two opposite directions and in two completely separate domains, any interlaced and intertwined relationship between the two is theoretically unascertainable. Although it is not the aim of the paper to recast this theoretical debate, the analysis presented here and based on the case of Bangladesh reveals how these two discourses interact and oppose each other in changing historical circumstances and political conditions. By taking into account both the interactive and oppositional political dynamics in light of the wider political-historical trajectories of nationalism in South Asia, this paper aims to delineate the shifting and contested relationship between Islam and nationalism with a special focus on the genealogy of nationalist discourses in which religion had been relegated both in distant relations and close cohabitation with 4.

6

Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, (Princeton, 1993), p.

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nationalistic struggle and identity formation process. I plan to unravel why the ‘secular’ and non-communal nationalistic ideology emanating from the national struggle against exploitative political and cultural relationships of the Bengali-Muslims with the West Pakistani rulers of undivided Pakistan had not been tenacious or, to put in other words, why Islam was being brought in as an important cultural marker in political domains or why a process of ‘nationalizing’ Islam was visible in the post-independence Bangladesh. I contend that historical shifts in the relationship of religion and nationalism articulated in three main paradigmatic discourses – integrative (during Pakistani rule), disintegrative (during the national struggle against Pakistan) and rhetorical-fusion (in post-independence Bangladesh) – have been the result of multiple and complex interplays of historical conditions and forces of political powers. In this interplay, as my argument reveals, it is not the Islamic leaders such as the ulama (Islamic scholars) and the Islamists, but rather the ‘Muslim democrats’ 7 and the ‘Muslim modernists’, 8 the social classes that emerged in the context of modernity in colonial India, who took leading roles in associating religion with nationalism in favor of their own political agenda and discourses. In the colonial period, such association strengthened the struggle of the Muslims against the domination of imperial power and of the potential Hindu raj. In the postcolonial context, it Unlike the Islamists who opt for state power to establish a shariabased Islamic state, Muslim democrats do not wish to establish an Islamic state, though they may utilize Islam in gaining political ascendancy and votes for state power. Vali Nasr, ‘The Rise of ‘Muslim Democracy’’, Journal of Democracy, 16/2 (2005), pp. 13–14. 8 ‘Muslim modernists’ refers to those Muslims ‘who have been educated in modern Western (or Westernised) institutions of learning and have sought to rethink or adapt Muslim practices, institutions, and discourses in light of both what they take to be “true” Islam-as opposed to how the Islamic tradition has evolved in history―and of how they see the challenges and opportunities of modernity.’ Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ‘Pluralism, Democracy and the ‘Ulama’, in Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, Ed. Robert W. Hefner, (Princeton: 2005), p. 82. 7

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 377 tends to empower, legitimize, broaden, and secure the power of the liberal-democratic forces in which Islamic forces found a space of interaction and co-optation. The argument presented here is largely based on discourse analysis by which I try to capture the core discourses of the nationalist agenda articulated in ideologies of the political parties and their leaderships.

PAKISTANI ISLAMIC NATIONHOOD AND THE RISE OF ‘BANGALEE’ NATIONALISM

After the decolonization of the Indian subcontinent in 1947, the newly born Pakistan started her journey with several historicalpolitical legacies: the Muslim modernists’ ambivalent Islamic political rhetoric under which ethnic, linguistic, and regional identities of the Indian Muslims subsumed into a religiously defined nation; ‘invention’ of ‘Islamism’, such as by Maududi, that ideologically sought political and social remedy to the crisis of Muslims on the basis of Islam; 9 the traditional ulama, who endorsed the modernist-led independence movement in the hope of a politically, as well as theologically, defined homeland; and the Bengali-Muslim leaderships. The rise of a new sense of nationalism – ‘Bangalee’ (Bengali) nationalism – in East Pakistan (present Bangladesh) was inextricably tied to the political dynamics of these factors, as the discussed in the following section. The Islamic forces, including the followers of Maulana Maududi and of the elite Urdu-speaking traditional ulama, found the newly born modern state was far behind what they expected it would be. The founding leader of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876–1948), was a Muslim modernist who successfully maneuvered Islam as an integrative paradigm for nationalism prior to the independence but never envisaged Pakistan be a theological

Irfan Ahmad, ‘Genealogy of the Islamic state: reflections on Maududi’s political thought and Islamism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15, May (2009), pp. 152–156. 9

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state in the post-independent period. 10 In the first speech delivered to the Constituent Assembly in 1947, he clarified this position. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this State of Pakistan. …You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State. …We are starting with the fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.’ 11

The relationship between the state and religion as conceived by Jinnah was distinctively secular, modern, and Western in its origin, for he envisaged a clear separation between the two. He rejected the notion that the Pakistani state be defined with divine sovereignty. The secular vision of the state was an onslaught to the Islamists’ and ulama’s visions of an ‘imagined’ homeland that once drove them to the movement. Therefore, the demand for an ‘Islamic state’ was emerging as a by-product of the ambivalent political struggle. The Islamic forces, despite their sectarian and theological differences, concerted their political demand: the foundation of an ‘Islamic state’. One of the first organized initiatives for the establishment of a sharia-based state was seen in a convention in Karachi in 1950, in which 31 leading and prominent Islamists, ulama, and mystic leaders, including Allama Suleiman Nadwi (1884–1953) and Maulana Maududi of all Pakistan attended, and where a twenty-two-point resolution for the promulgation of an ‘Islamic Constitution’ was upheld. 12 See, Chitta Ranjan Misra, ‘United Independent Bengal Movement’, in Banglapedia: National encyclopedia of Bangladesh, Eds. Sirajul Islam, Sajahan Miah, (Asiatic Society, 2014/2003). Retrieved from: http://en.bangla pedia.org/index.php?title=United_Independent_Bengal_Movement 11 A. S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin, (London, 1997), p. 175, quoted in Ferhana Hashem, ‘Elite Conceptions of Muslim Identity: From the Partition of Bengal to the Creation of Bangladesh’, National Identities, 12/1 (2010), p. 65. 12 For the points and a list of the Islamists, ulama, and spiritual leaders of various sects who participated in the convention, see Kashifiat’s Blog, “Agreed 22-Points of Ulema-e-Pakistan to Establish Islamic Sharia,” 10

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 379 The ruling elites of Pakistan partially responded to the Islamizing demands but without paying heed to the core political agenda of the Islamic forces: the foundation of an Islamic state. The promulgation of an ‘Islamic Republic’ in the first Constitution of Pakistan in 1956 was such an example. On the other hand, a common political tactic was manipulating Islam as a means of political control; constructing a unitary state and nationhood was lurking both among civilian and military regimes. For the BengaliMuslim leadership, such ideological articulation of Pakistani nationalism, however, was a tool of exploiting other ethnic, regional, and linguistic groups by the minority Urdu-speaking bureaucrats, industrialists, capitalists, and political elites of West Pakistan. Jinnah utilized the Bengali leadership in mobilizing the Muslim masses, the largest in number as compared to other regions, under the banner of the Muslim League. But in the postindependence period, he instead chose the Urdu-speaking landlords in East Pakistan and put aside the Bengali leadership who, to Jinnah, were not loyal, for they attempted to establish a ‘United Bengal’ with the Hindu political leadership in the preindependence period. 13 The language movement in East Pakistan as cultural, nationalistic aspiration juxtaposed with the economic-political struggle against the exploitative political elites of West Pakistan cemented the ‘Bangalee’ (Bengali) nationalism. Despite Bengali being spoken as the mother tongue by a majority of the population (56.4 percent) and Urdu by only 3.4 percent, the Urdu-speaking Muslim League elites wanted Urdu as the state language of Pakistan based on a communal cleavage between Muslim and Hindu communities. 14 Before the Partition of the Indian subcontinent, accessed Nov. 3, 2011, http://kashifiat.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/ agreed-22-points-of-ulema-e-pakistan-to-establish-islamic-shariah/. 13 Chitta Ranjan Misra, ‘United Independent Bengal Movement’, in Banglapedia: National encyclopedia of Bangladesh, Eds. Sirajul Islam, Sajahan Miah, (Asiatic Soceity, 2014/2003). Retrieved from: http://en.bangla pedia.org/index.php?title=United_Independent_Bengal_Movement 14 Safar Ali Akanda, Language Movement and the Making of Bangladesh, (Dhaka, 2013), 11; Philip Oldenburg, ‘‘A Place Insufficiently Imagined’:

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Urdu had been constructed as an ‘Islamic’ language by Muslim leaders and the literary gentry in order to offset the communal politics of language and religion in which Hindi was also increasingly being associated with the Hindus and their religion. 15 The West Pakistani rulers aimed to Islamize Bengali by introducing Arabic, Urdu, and Persian vocabularies, so that ‘Sanskritization be avoided’ 16 in order to ‘conform to the Islamic ideology.’ 17 The language debate appeared just months after the creation of Pakistan when a Bengali politician, Dhirendranath Dutt (1886– 1971), raised an amendment to the Constituent Assembly rules that Bengali be allowed along with English and Urdu, for it was the language spoken by the majority of the population. In response to Dutt’s motion to the assembly, Liaquat Ali Khan (1895–1951), the Prime Minister of Pakistan, contended that Pakistan is a Muslim state and it must have as its lingua franca the language of the Muslim nation…the mover [Dutt] should realise that Pakistan has been created because of the demand of hundred million Muslims in this subcontinent and language of the hundred million Muslims is Urdu. 18

Promoting Urdu as a unitary cultural means of Muslim nationhood was the political ideology of the Urdu-speaking Pakistani elites, including Jinnah, the Governor General. Jinnah espoused Pakistan as a secular state but was not willing to recognize Bengali or any other language as lingua franca, for other languages had no association with the Islamic tradition. In his speech at the convocation of Dacca (now Dhaka) University, he argued that Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 44/4 (1985), pp. 716–718. 15 For details on communal politics and the language issue, see Paul Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India, (London, 1974). 16 Rafiqul Islam, ‘The Bengali Language Movement and the Emergence of Bangladesh’, in Language and Civilization Change in South Asia, Ed. Clarence Maloney, Contributions to Asian Studies-II, (The Hague, 1978), p. 146. 17 Ibid., p. 146. 18 S. A. Akanda, Language Movement, p. 24.

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 381 Urdu would be the only lingua franca because it was the only language closest to Islamic culture and Muslim tradition. There can, however, be only one lingua franca,… and that language should be Urdu and cannot be any other. The State language, therefore, must obviously be Urdu, a language that has been nurtured by a hundred million Muslims of this subcontinent, a language understood throughout the length and breadth of Pakistan, and above all, a language which, more than any other provincial language, embodies the best that is in Islamic culture and Muslim tradition and is nearest to the language used in other Islamic countries. 19

Jinnah believed that the unitary language policy would strengthen the political integrity of all regions in Pakistan, as he made clear in stating, ‘If the component parts of the state are to march forward to unison, that language in my opinion, can only be Urdu.’ 20 The forced and undemocratic language policy generated two particular results in the relationship between East and West Pakistan: first, it provided a common platform for Bengali people, including Hindus, irrespective of political groupings and class differences, to unite against the West Pakistani, Urdu-speaking ruling elites; second, it alienated the Bengali-Muslim political leadership from the ruling party and led to the foundation of a regionally-informed political party – the Awami Muslim League (hereafter AML) – which galvanized the cultural causes coupled with economicpolitical exploitation against the West Pakistani ruling regimes. Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasani 21 (1880–1976), a theologian Mahomed Ali Jinnah, Speeches as Governor-General of Pakistan 1947– 1948, (Karachi, n.d.), p. 90, quoted in Oldenburg, ‘A Place Insufficiently Imagined’, p. 716. 20 Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Speeches as Governor-General of Pakistan 1947– 1948, (Karachi, 1948), p. 95, quoted in Islam, ‘The Bengali Language Movement’, p. 144. 21 Custers (2010) contends that Bhasani alone led the transition from Islamic to secular politics in the decades before the independence of Bangladesh. Peter Custers, ‘Maulana Bhasani and the Transition to Secular 19

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and follower of a mystic tradition of Islam, but equally prominent as a politician for promoting an Islamic egalitarian and just society, particularly among the peasantry class, pioneered the foundation of the MAL in 1949 as the president of the party. The language movement helped transcend the political differences within the Bengali leadership when the ruling regime used force and coercion in undermining the demand. On February 21 of 1952, when a mass demonstration was organized for the demand of Bengali as the state language, the ruling regime killed several students, injured hundreds, and arrested all the prominent Bengali leaders, including Maulana Bhasani. The bloodshed on ‘Ekushey February’ (21st February), a defining historical event for Bengali peoples’ shifting nationalistic aspiration from religion to language, had been the driving force for all nationalist movements in the later period. The day was declared, and now observed, as ‘martyr day’, and the ‘Shahid Minar’ (Martyr Monument) was installed in memory of those killed, and has been a powerful symbol of Bengali nationalistic imagination and struggle till today. The language movement was ‘a renaissance of Bengali culture and an emphasis on secular ideas as opposed to Islamic ideology.’ 22 To a prominent contemporary Bengali historian, ‘the bond in language is more this-worldly, secular, and democratic than the bond in religion.’ 23 However, the emergence of MAL as an oppositional, regional political force against the Muslim League was not on the basis of a secular agenda alone. The party also incorporated Islam but with a different aim: the establishment of an ‘Islamic social order’, 24 as manifested in its first manifesto. Even it could not make any difference with the Muslim League in terms Politics in East Bengal’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 47/2 (2010), p. 231. 22 Nasir Islam, ‘Islam and National Identity: The Case of Pakistan and Bangladesh’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 13/1 (1981), p. 63. 23 Serajul Islam Chowdhury, Bangaleer Jatiyatabad, rev. ed., (Dhaka, 2000), p. xvii. 24 M Rashiduzzaman, ‘The Awami League in the Political Development of Pakistan’, Asian Survey, 10/7 (1970), p. 576.

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 383 of its non-communal character, for it restricted membership to Muslims until 1955, the year when the party dropped the word ‘Muslim’ and was renamed the Awami League. 25 Nevertheless, regarding how Islam be treated in the state’s governance and politics, the prominent Bengali-Muslim leadership, such as Maulana Bhasani, Husayn Shahid Suhrawardy (1892–1963), A.K. Fazlul Huq (1873–1962), and Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920–1975) differed significantly with the notions promoted by Urdu-speaking civilian and military leadership after Jinnah. For instance, when the first Constitution of Pakistan (in 1956) adopted ‘Islamic Republic’ both Sheikh Mujibur and Suhrawardy denounced it as a means of political exploitation. Suhrawardy, in a speech to the National Assembly, pointed to the rulers ‘you are deluding people here by calling this an Islamic Republic.’ 26 The decreasing role of religion characterized by the growing non-communal discourse in the political struggle of the BengaliMuslim leaders had also been shaped by the presence of a large number of Hindu communities in East Pakistan, whose support was crucial to gain the political ascendancy against the Muslim League. To the Bengali leadership, Pakistan was a homeland for both Muslims and non-Muslims, but for the West Pakistani rulers, particularly after Jinnah, it was only for Muslims (see Hashem, 2010). The Bengali people’s nationalistic struggle had been coupled with two powerful nationalistic aspirations within the Pakistani state’s framework: a) linguistic-cultural, and b) the right to selfautonomy. Both discourses were reflected in the first provincial election of 1954, in which Jukto Front (United Front), a coalition of various regional parties of all ideologies – including MAL, Islamic (such as Nejam-e-Islam), leftist (such as Ganatantri Dal) and peasant parties (such as Krishak Sramik Party of Fazlul Huq) – won a landslide victory against the ruling Muslim League. The language movement that united Bengalis made the political coalition possible under the Jukto Front, which put the highest emphasis on the language issue along with other regional economic 25 26

Ibid., p. 575. F. Hashem, ‘Elite Conceptions of Muslim Identity’, p. 74.

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points in its twenty-one-point manifesto. 27 After the victory of the Jukto Front, and although Bengali had been recognized as the state language along with Urdu, the Islamizing efforts to Bengali culture, an idiosyncratic practice seen among all the rulers, was persistent. In 1967, the military ruler Ayub Khan’s (reign. 1958–1969) proscription of Rabindranath Tagore’s (the Bengali Nobel Laureate) poems and songs on Radio Pakistan was an expression of a xenophobic attitude towards Bengali culture and attempts to reduce the influence of Hindu literary figure. The cultural control, both political and theocratic, had fueled the grievances of the Bengali leadership, who found the basis of their struggle in resistance to economic repression and denial of political rights. To the West Pakistani rulers, Islam was the means to justify and legitimize Pakistani Muslim nationhood. On the contrary, to the Bengali leadership, Islam could never be the means of cultural and political exploitation. To Sheikh Mujibur, ‘The Bengalis have shed blood to establish in Bangladesh the right to read Tagore.’ 28 The oppressive cultural policy, which had already been compounded further with economic exploitation and denial of political rights, made the quest for regional autonomy a legitimized political demand. The Bengali-Muslims, who expected Pakistan would have a place of opportunity for reducing their economic plight, found it as a new form of economic exploitation against them. Sheikh Mujibur, the leader who championed the demand of autonomy and became the symbol of the nationalistic movement, echoed this view. Even 200 years’ rule by the colonial British could not exploit the people to such an extent as the unchallenged exploitation of this wing (East Pakistan) of the country during the last 23 years of the vested interests from West Pakistan. 29

For all the points of the manifesto, see S. A. Akanda, Language Movement, pp. 215–216. 28 Donald Eugene Smith, ‘Secularization in Bangladesh’, Worldview, 16/4 (1973), p. 14. 29 K. P. Misra, ‘Intra-State Imperialism: The Case of Pakistan,’ Journal of Peace Research, 9/1 (1972), p. 27. 27

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 385 Throughout the 1960s and prior to the beginning of war, the discourses on economic disparity and denial of political rights dominated the national struggle against Pakistan, as reflected in Sheikh Mujib’s six-point formula and historic speech on March 7, 1971. The cultural, nationalist aspiration coupled with politicoeconomic aspiration led to the emergence of Bengali nationalism primarily because of the undemocratic and repressive nature of the Pakistani state. The regional autonomy, which later turned to an independence movement, largely emanated from a series of conflicts between petit-bourgeoisies and modern, educated classes of people, in two geographically distant regions of Pakistan. Both these classes had similar political origins: the supporters of the Muslim League against the ‘Hindu’ Congress during the undivided Indian subcontinent. Though both classes belong to a common religion (Islam) they were different in terms of ethnicity and language. Gradually, the West Pakistani elite class gained control of the economy, industry, and resources in East Pakistan after the departure of the Hindu economic elites. 30 It was in this disjuncture the rift between Pakistani and Bengali nationalist aspiration had emerged. However, the identity contestation had not influenced the mass peasantry class much, at least, until the mid-60s, though they were being mobilized on many occasions (for instance, the language movement and the provincial election of 1956). A survey conducted in the mid-1960s revealed that 48 percent of the surveyed population identified themselves as Pakistani whereas 11 percent considered themselves Bengali. 31 The political movements in the later stage, such as the mass movement of 1969 and the campaign for the 1970 election, reawakened the people again, though they were not concerned about what secular-Bengali and Islamic-Pakistani meant to them. The rise of Bengali nationalism was, therefore, the result of multiple, but interconnected, historical and political forces that the K. P. Misra, ‘Intra-State Imperialism’. Howard Schuman, ‘A Note on the Rapid Rise of Mass Bengali Nationalism in East Pakistan’, American Journal of Sociology, 78/2 (1972), p. 292. 30 31

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Bengali people witnessed in the years after the formation of Pakistan. The denial of the right to language was the beginning of a process of alienation of the Bengali-Muslims from the West Pakistanis, and was coupled with the denial of democratic and political rights and growing economic disparity between the two regions. For Pakistani nationalism, Islam was the ideological base for the construction of the nationhood primarily as a homeland for the Muslims against the rival ‘Hindus’ and their country, India. On the other hand, for Bengali nationalism, Islam was important to establish a just and inclusive society but not for political control.

FROM ‘BENGALI’ TO ‘BANGLADESHI’ NATIONALISM AND THE ‘NATIONALIZATION’ OF ISLAM

The nationalism the Bengali people constructed during the struggle against the West Pakistani rulers is largely considered as ‘secular’ in its origin, for it was based on ‘broad cultural, rather than narrow religious, terms.’ 32 Bengali-Muslim resistance against Islamizing the language and culture cemented the basis of this non-communal ideology, a clear shift from the Pakistani nationalism that tried to homogenize the nation according to the communal cleavage. This ideological shift of Bangladesh as a new nation-state had been adopted in the Constitution of 1972, the genesis of which lay in the history of national struggle against West Pakistan. We, the people of Bangladesh, having proclaimed our Independence on the 26th day of March, 1971, and through a historic struggle for national liberation, establish the independent Sovereign Peoples’ Republic of Bangladesh; pledging that the high ideals of nationalism, socialism, democracy and secularism, which inspired our heroic people to dedicate themselves to, and our brave martyrs to sacrifice their

T. N. Madan, ‘Two Faces of Bengali Ethnicity: Muslim Bengali or Bengali Muslims’, The Developing Economies, 10/1 (1993), p. 84. 32

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 387 lives in, the national liberation struggle, shall be fundamental principles of the Constitution. 33

For Pakistanis, Islam was the only ideology and symbol of unity of the nationhood. But for Bengali people, language and culture were the sources of national unity and identity as defined in the Constitution of 1972: The unity and solidarity of the Bengali nation, which deriving its identity from its language and culture, attained a sovereign and independent Bangladesh through a united and determined struggle in the war of independence, shall be the basis of Bengali nationalism. 34

Adaptation of Bengali nationalism justified the nationalist struggle in which the symbols and discourses on Bengali nationalist aspiration were important in challenging the Pakistani Muslim nationalism. Slogans like Joy Bangla (Victory of Bengal) and songs like ‘Banglar Hindu, Banglar Boudha, Banglar Kristan, Banglar Musalman – Amra sobai Bangalee’ (The Hindus of Bengal, the Buddhists of Bengal, the Christians of Bengal, and the Muslims of Bengal – we all are Bengali) were against Pakistan’s Islamic solidarity and communal construction of the nationhood. Although Bengali nationalism was characterized by a non-communal, secular, and inclusive ideology, it did go unchallenged and unquestioned before and after independence. Islamic forces, of which some seemed to support the regional causes at an earlier stage, jointly took a stance against the popular Awami League apprehending the disintegration of Pakistan which, to them, would eventually undermine Islam. In the National Election of 1970, Islam Pasand, a coalition of Islamic parties including Jamaat-e-Islam, Nejam-e-Islam, Jamiyat-ul Ulamae Islam, and factions of the Muslim League, competed against the

Government of Bangladesh, The Constitution of the Peoples’ Republic of Bangladesh, 1972, (Dhaka, 1975), pp. 1–4, quoted in Islam, ‘The Bengali Language Movement’, p. 151. 34 Ibid., p. 151. 33

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Awami League and secured 12.7 percent of the vote. 35 In postindependence Bangladesh, the absence of religion in national identity certainly did not please the followers of these parties, whose political rights were banned. The non-religious and secular character of the new nationalism adapted by the Awami League government had largely been invisible in the political manifesto and agendas of the national struggle. All the charters, manifestos, and demands, such as the election manifesto of 1956, the six-point demands of 1966, and Mujib’s historical speech on March 7, 1971 (a few weeks prior to the beginning of war) heavily emphasized cultural, political, and economic liberation of the Bengali people but did not address secularism or a secular vision of the Bengali nations, though it lay at the heart of all movements against Pakistan. In the Pakistan period, to the prominent Bengali leadership, including Suhrawardy, Maulana Bhasani and Mujib, political exploitation of Islam was unacceptable since it legitimized the West Pakistani ruling elites’ undemocratic and oppressive policy, but the Islamic notion of an equitable and exploitation-free society was not unacceptable to them. Even Sheikh Mujib in the historic speech on March 7, 1971, which is considered the foundation of the declaration of independence, emphatically expressed Islamic phrases to energize the masses: ‘Inshallah [by the grace of Allah] we will liberate the people of this country’. The secularism as an ideology defining the nationalism did not deny the absence of religion, rather it was characterized by the equal presence and right of all groups to exercise religion. In this sense, it was ‘poly-religious’ 36 (Khondker 2010, 191). The notion of dharmaniropekhsata (the Bengali word for secularism) put emphasis on ‘religious neutrality’ and particularly highlighted the nonTazeen M. Murshid, ‘State, Nation, Identity: The Quest for Legitimacy in Bangladesh’, in The Post-colonial States of South Asia: Political and Constitutional Problems, Ed. Amita Shastri, A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, (London, 2001), p. 164. 36 Habibul Haque Khondker, ‘The Curious Case of Secularism in Bangladesh: What is the Relevance For the Muslim Majority Democracies?’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 11/2 (2010), p. 191. 35

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 389 communal, tolerant, and inclusive religious presence adopted in Article 12 of the 1972 Constitution that defined secularism as the elimination of: a. Communalism in all its forms b. Granting by the state of political status to any religion c. Abuse of religion for political purposes d. Discrimination against or persecution of persons practicing a particular religion 37 This neutral and non-communal ideology was the basis of secular Bengali nationalism. The Mujib regime (1972–1975) took several measures in undermining the communal character of the Bangladeshi state that was inherited from Pakistan. For instance, the Holy Qurʾan, an opening program of TV and radio introduced during the Pakistan period as an expression to Muslim Pakistani nationhood, was replaced by a secular program ‘Speaking the Truth’. Later, Mujib probably could sense that secularism could be seen as an alien concept to the Bengali masses, some of whom, particularly the followers of the Islamic parties, had already conceived the ideology as the absence of, or even antithesis to, religion. The ‘Speaking Truth’ program was replaced by the recitation of the holy books of Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity along with citation from the Qurʾan. Also, Mujib’s government took measures to revise the education curricula and aimed to bring the madrasa education into a more systematic structure under a Qudrat-e-Khuda Education Commission. Islamiyat, a subject introduced as compulsory for primary and secondary students during the Pakistan period, was recommended only as an elective subject from grade eight to twelve. 38 Mujib personally used popular Islamic phrases to give a message to the people that his secular philosophy did not mean that it would undermine the religious practices of the Bengali-

Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh, Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, Article 9, (Dacca, 1972), quoted in Zillur R. Khan, ‘Islam and Bengali Nationalism’, Asian Survey, 25/8 (1985), p. 846. 38 Shireen Hasan Osmany, Bangladeshi Nationalism: History of Dialectics and Dimensions, (Dhaka, 1992), pp. 122–123. 37

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Muslims. But in the relationship between state and religion, he continued to defend secularism as a non-communal policy as reflected in this speech: Secularism does not mean the absence of religion. You are a Musalman [Muslim], you perform your religion rites. There is no irreligiousness on the soil of Bangladesh but there is secularism. This sentence has a meaning and that meaning is that none would be allowed to exploit the people in the name of religion…No communal politics will be allowed in the country. 39

Mujib’s secular notion of nationalism had not been unquestioningly accepted by the Bengali people for several reasons; first, the people supported him as a national and iconic leader for liberating them but were unaware of what secularism meant to them; second, political groups, such as Islamic and some sections of leftist wing, which did not join the independence movement, resisted Mujib’s regime and his secular Bengali nationalism. Just after independence, these groups supported the ‘Muslim Bengal’ movement, a notion first appearing on Radio Pakistan the day after the independence of Bangladesh, Dec 17, 1971, arguing that the separation of Bengal was the restoration of Lahore Resolution of 1940’s, the basis of the formation of Pakistan as a federal state, though it could not gain ascendancy (Murshid 2001, 164; Fazal 2000, 192). Third, Bengali nationalism could successfully redefine the Bengali people, the Muslims, in particular, against the Pakistani Muslim nationhood and could accommodate the Bengali-Hindus but not the nonBengali indigenous minority, or ethnic and linguistic groups living in the same homeland. Nor could it provide a viable demarcation, except the war against Pakistan, between the Bengali-speaking people living in Bangladesh and those living in West Bengal of India, who mostly belong to the separate religious tradition of Hinduism. Tanveer Fazal, ‘Religion and Language in the Formation of Nationhood in Pakistan and Bangladesh’, in Nation and National Identity in South Asia, Eds. S. L. Sharma, T. K. Oommen, (New Delhi, 2000), p. 191. 39

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 391 In this context, the military ruler President Ziaur Rahman (reign 1977–1981) took a series of state policies after the assassination of Mujib, resulting in a twofold impact on identity and politics in Bangladeshi society. Zia’s de-secularization policy, as reflected in the constitutional amendment and in reinstating process of Islamic forces, brought back communal and religious constructs in the identity formation of the nation. In relation to his Islamizing endeavors, he invented a new notion of nationalism – Bangladeshi – by de-emphasizing the secular, non-communal, and cultural-linguistic spirit of Bengali nationalism. By redefining the nationalism and creating new political spaces for Islamists, he could establish the ideological base of his newly founded political party Bangladesh Nationalist Party (hereafter BNP) against the Awami League and its ideological base. Zia’s efforts to ‘nationalize’ Islam began with the incorporation of Islamic ideals and popular phrases in the Constitution. The Islamic phrase Bismillah-ar-Rahman-ar-Rahim (In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful) was added prior to the preamble of the Constitution, ‘secularism’ was obliterated, and ‘socialism’ was revised by the following changes to the preamble of the Constitution. The principles of absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah, nationalism, democracy and socialism meaning economic and social justice…shall constitute the fundamental principles of state policy. Absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah shall be basis of all actions. 40

The changes were welcomed by Islamic forces, which were against the liberation war and the Mujib’s notion of secularism and Bengali nationalism. By giving an Islamic identity to the state, Zia aimed to establish close ties to the Muslim world, as it was clearly added in the Constitution: ‘the state shall endeavour to consolidate, preserve and strengthen fraternal relations among Muslim countries based on Islamic solidarity,’ 41 and this was tangible when Saudi aid started 40 41

S. H. Osmany, Bangladeshi Nationalism, p. 129. Ibid., p. 139.

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to come and Bengali migrant workers began to increase from his period. In an attempt to give an Islamic connotation to national identity, Zia ‘invented’ the notion of Bangladeshi nationalism in 1978 on the basis of seven principles: ‘territory; people, irrespective of religion; Bengali language; culture; economic life; religion; and the legacy of the 1971 liberation war.’ 42 His interpretation of Bangladeshi nationalism was self-contradictory as it incorporated both religious neutrality and religious-bias: ‘people, irrespective of religion’ and ‘religion.’ 43 However, the Bangladeshi nationalism associated with the BNP and the Bengali nationalism associated with the Awami League contested in three discourses: language, religion, and the geographical boundaries of the nation: Apparently identical, “the Bangalee nationalism” of the Awami League and the “Bangladeshi nationalism” with associated with BNP (the Bangladeshi national party) differed markedly in terms of emphasis on language and culture, inclusion and exclusion of “nationals” and “aliens”. While the former appreciated the territorial and political separateness from the Indian Bengal but accepted the entire heritage of Bengali language and culture as its own, the latter highlighted the cultural differences between the two regions by bringing in religion as the defining marker of “Bangladeshi” nation along with religion. 44

Zia’s policy de-emphasized language and culture and reemphasized religion and tended to ‘nationalize’ Islam, which affected the nature of the relationship between Islam and politics and between Islam and the state. He continued to de-emphasize the communal character of the nationhood, which the Mujib government guarded in the constitutional measures, and it ultimately brought in those discourses and ideologies in state affairs, political culture and public life against which the Bengali Muhammad Ghulam Kabir, Changing Face of Nationalism: The Case of Bangladesh, (Dhaka, 1995), p. 199. 43 Ibid. 44 T. Fazal, ‘Religion and Language’, p. 194. 42

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 393 fought during the Pakistan period. For instance, Mujib’s secular policy allowed the recitation of holy texts of all major religions with equal time distribution, but Zia extended the Koran recitation program from five to 15 minutes. Zia replaced the popular symbolic slogan of language and independent movements, adopted by Awami League; Joy Bangla of Bengali origin was replaced by introducing Bangladesh Zindabad (Zindabad of Urdu and Persian origin). Islam as an important identity marker had been legitimized in the state’s affairs and upheld in public life. Friday was made a half-day holiday, a separate Ministry of Religious Affairs and a Board of Madrasa Education were established, and an initiative for the foundation of an Islamic University, with the aid of Saudi Arabia, was also undertaken. 45 Zia also created a political space for the Islamists and the ulama, the participation of which were proscribed during the reign of Mujib. His cabinet and newly established political party (BNP) comprised many ulama and Islamists, even those who took an antiliberation stance in the Independence War against West Pakistan. 46 For instance, Maulana Abdul Mannan, an alleged collaborator with Pakistan during the liberation war of Bangladesh and also a founder of a pro-Islamic daily, the Inquilab, and a former president of the Jami’atul Madarisin (Association of Aliya, or state-aided Madrasa Teachers), became a minister in Zia’s cabinet. 47 One of the central impacts of Zia’s Islamization policy was the return of the old Islamic forces such as Jamaat, Nejam-e-Islam, etc. and the emergence of new Islamic political fronts under the leadership of the Islamic scholars. The domain of Islamic political forces began to expand from the predominant Jamaat to madrasa-based ulama’s parties to mystic leadership based party. 48 Moreover, Zia’s See, S. H. Osmany, Bangladeshi Nationalism, pp. 129–130; H. Kabir, Changing Face of Nationalism, p. 201; Ali Riaz, God Willing: The Politics of Islamism in Bangladesh, (Lanham, 2004), p. 36. 46 A. Riaz, God Willing, p. 36. 47 Ibid., pp. 36–37. 48 Humayun Kabir, ‘Beyond Jamaat-e-Islami: The Political Rise of the Deobandis, the Mystic Leaders, and Islamism in Bangladesh,’ in Religion 45

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successor, the military ruler President Husain Mohammad Ershad (reign. 1981–90) who formed a political party – Jatiya Party – during his reign found Zia’s Islamizing policy an effective means of legitimizing his power. He declared Islam a state religion and fulfilled the long-cherished demand of the Islamists. He even proposed Arabic be taught as a compulsory subject in primary and secondary education, though it was not successful due to strong resistance from the secular, educated, and urban intelligentsia. In the process of de-emphasizing secular and non-communal spirit, the military regime (1977–1990) promoted an Islamic rhetorical paradigm, a clear shift from the disintegrative paradigm of religion and nationalism during the national movement against Pakistan, and a closer association to the integrative paradigm of religion and nationalism as seen in the communal politics during the pre-independence period in colonial India. This had an indelible effect on the production of ‘Islamic sensibility’ 49 in the political culture and practices in the democratic era (1990 to present). The liberal democratic parties, both the secular-cultural Awami League and the promoter of ‘liberal Islamic nationalism’ (the BNP) legitimized the Islamic forces often by making political coalition either in gaining power of the state or in opposing the government regime. For instance, the Awami League, which promotes secular Bengali nationalist aspirations and denounces vehemently the role of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (herafter BJI) for its anti-liberation role in the liberation war, forged a political coalition with BJI against the BNP government in 1996. Similarly, the BNP, which is known for its pro-Islamic nationalist ideology, made a political coalition with the BJI and Islami Oikyo Jot (United Islamic Front; hereafter IOJ), a Deobandi madrasa-based ulama-led alliance of political parties that emerged in the early 1990s against BJI, 50 in the general election in 2001 and won a landslide victory. After Zia’s regime, the BNP-led government (reign. 2001–2006) brought the Islamists into state power by allotting different and Representation: Islam and Democracy, Eds. Ingrid Mattson, Paul NesbittLarking, Nawaz Tahir, (Newcastle, 2015), pp. 50–78. 49 W. V. Schendel, A History of Bangladesh, p. 253. 50 For more details, see H. Kabir, ‘Beyond Jamaat-e-Islami’.

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 395 ministerial portfolios. It was only in 2011 that the rhetorical paradigm began to transform into the fusion paradigm when the Awami League-led, fourteen-party coalition revived the original principles of the constitution of 1972 – secularism and Bangalee (Bengali) nationalism – and omitted ‘the principles of absolute trust and faith in the Allah’ but retained Islam as a state religion, the Islamic phrases and allowed sectarian political parties. 51 This hybrid of secularism and Islam produced a ‘fusion of ideologies’ in the state. 52

THE LIMIT OF SECULAR NATIONALISM IN CONTEMPORARY BANGLADESH

The rhetorical-fusion ideology under which the present Awami League-led government re-adapted the secular spirit is dubbed by some scholars a ‘“new brand” of secularism’ that forcibly aimed to ‘minoritize Islam’ in a majority Muslim country. 53 To the opponents of the Awami League, perceptibly the rival BNP and its trusted and allied Islamic forces, the secularization project targeted to undermine not just the sentiments and cultural ethos of the Bangladeshi people but also political opponents. For some (particularly those who advocated a concrete secular nationalistic aspiration be established in line with secular nationalistic spirit in the country) the Awami League government is lenient to discard the Islamic connotation of the state principles for the sake of power politics. The following two cases – one that aimed to revitalize the non-communal and Bengali nationalist spirit and the other that sought an interventionist role for the state in limiting the principles and practices of secular-liberal culture, ideology, beliefs, and policies for protecting the sanctity of Islam – are illustrative

‘Caretaker System Abolished, JS passes constitution’s 15th amendment bill amid BNP’s absence’, Daily Star, July 1, 2011, first page. 52 N. M. Harun, ‘Fifteenth Amendment Introduces Fusion of Ideologies’, BDNews24.Com, July 7, 2011, accessed July 8, 2011. http://opinion.bdnews24.com/2011/07/07/fifteenth-amendment. 53 MD Saidul Islam, ‘‘Minority Islam’ in Muslim Majority Bangladesh: The Violent Road to a New Brand of Secularism’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 31/1 (2011), p. 126. 51

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here for understanding the dilemma and twisting journey of the Bangladeshi national aspiration that entered a new phase but is still characterized by both secular and religious undercurrents. Apart from the political complexities associated with both of these movements, which require more detail delineation in a separate study, the discussion here focuses primarily on the contested nature of secular and Islamic nationalist articulations. Shahbag Movement: Secular-Nationalistic Aspiration against Islamism? In early February 2013, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis from all walks of life joined a non-violent street protest, known as Shahbag Movement. Enthusiasts dubbed it the ‘Tahrir of Dhaka’, organized as it was by youthful bloggers and social media activists under the banner of Gonojagoron Mancha (Stage for Mass Awakening) to demand the death penalty of a prominent Islamist – the senior leader of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami (hereafter BJI) – who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Crime Tribunal of Bangladesh after being convicted for war crimes during the Independence War. For several weeks, the protesters – to whom the judgment against the Islamist was too lenient as compared to the weight of his crimes – continued to uphold the spirit and symbols of the liberation war by singing the national anthem and popular Bengali folk songs, reciting and chanting nationalistic poems and slogans such as joy bangla, holding candlelit vigils, using the national flag as headbands, and performing folktheatre, etc. Soon, the movement received wide media attention not just in the national but also in the international arena, 54 and many observers enthusiastically viewed it as the resurgence of the secularnational spirit of Bangladesh’s liberation war. The movement gradually spread across many urban areas of the country, appealing For example, ‘Huge Bangladesh Rally Seeks Death Penalty for War Crimes’, BBC News Asia, February 8, 2013, accessed Nov 11, 2014. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21383632. ‘Thousands Join Shahbag Sit-In’, Daily Star, February 7, 2013, accessed Nov 11, 2014. http://archive.DailyStar.net/newDesign/news-det ails.php?nid=268142 54

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 397 to youths in particular, and extended its demands from the capital punishment of the Islamists accused of war crimes to a legal prohibition on the BJI, the predominant Islamic party infamously known for its anti-liberation stance and close collaboration with the Pakistani military during the Independence War, as well as on all of its financial and business ventures, social organizations, media institutions, and political wings in the country. 55 On the one hand, the Bangladesh Awami League (hereafter BAL)-led allied government’s initiative (which was part of an election pledge) to try accused war criminals (mostly senior BJI leaders) 56 four decades after the country’s independence in 1971, enchanted many, including the families of the victims of the liberation war and those who want an end to exploitation of religion in the name of politics. However, on the other hand it generated hue and cry, debates, and contestations among various people in national and international circles, who criticize the war crimes initiative as politically motivated. 57 In this context, the popular demand of the Shahbag Movement justified and legitimized the BAL’s war trial agenda, which the party asserts is fair, follows international standards and is free from political intervention. See, ‘Jamaat Nishiddher Somoi Bedhe Dilo Torunera’, Prothom Alo, February 22, 2013, accessed Nov 11, 2014. http://epaper.prothomalo.com/view/dhaka/2013-02-22/1. ‘Charge Jamaat for War Crimes: Act Before March 26’, Daily Star, February 22, 2013, accessed Nov. 11, 2014. http://archive.Daily Star.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=270029 56 For a general introduction to the key accused Islamists of BJI, see ‘Bangladesh War Crimes Trial: Key Accused’, BBC News Asia, November 24, 2014, accessed November 25, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/ world-asia-20970123 57 Shamim Chowdhury, ‘The Politics at Play in Bangladesh War Trial’, Al Jazeera, October 29, 2014, accessed November 11, 2014. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/10/politics-at-playbangladesh-war-trials-2014102953244138968.html. Rabiul H Zaki, ‘The Economist and the War Crimes Trial in Bangladesh’, Bdnews24.com, April 4, 2013, accessed April 5, 2013. http://opinion.bdnews24.com/2013/ 04/04/the-economist-and-the-war-crimes-trial-in- bangladesh/. 55

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The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), the main rival of the BAL in electoral and power politics, ridiculed the Shahbag Movement, 58 for they believed it was orchestrated by the government as a means of political backlash against BJI, one of BNP’s close political allies since 2001. Moreover, the Islamic political fronts beyond BJI, 59 such as those under the leadership of the traditional Islamic scholars (ulama), which had hitherto been unseen as openly taking BJI’s in its political struggle against the BAL’s war trial initiative, began to rise with a new Islamic agenda when religious sentiment was maneuvered for mobilizing the masses against the movement. The Bangladeshi media, characterized by a deeply divisive partisan political-economic interest, often play important roles in ‘manufacturing consent’ and public opinion in line with a party’s political discourses. In the embattled media wars on the Shahbag Movement, when the proliberal and secular media praised the movement as a historic epoch, the pro-Islamic and pro-BNP media began to dub it as ‘antiIslamic’, not just because it allowed free mingling and overnight stays of the male and female activists for several weeks during the protest but also because it was organized by those – the youth bloggers – who were accused of blasphemous writings on Islam and the Prophet, as excavated by some opponents at a later stage. The continued reproduction of the derogatory blog writings of the accused coordinators and initiators of the movement by proIslamic and pro-BNP dailies, 60 which eventually led to the killing of ‘BNP Now Ridicules Shahbag Protests’, Daily Star, February 27, 2013, accessed November 11, 2014. http://archive.Daily Star.net/ newDesign/news-details.php?nid=270643 59 The political Islamic fronts associated with the leadership of the local Deobandi madrasa-based ulama and with the spiritual master (pir) of various Sufi traditions have a distant relationship with BJI, both in political and theological doctrine. See H. Kabir, ‘Beyond Jamaat-e-Islami’. 60 Naya Diganta and Amar Desh, both of which are known as pro-BJI and pro-BNP dailies, and whose print publications the government recently banned, editorialized against the bloggers. Amar Desh reproduced the ‘anti-Islamic’ writings of the bloggers on the front page of its issues from February 18–20, 2013. 58

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 399 an alleged blog writer 61 and to the arrests of several others in the aftermath, reawakened and brought out many traditional Islamic scholars primarily associated with the country’s unofficial Deobandi madrasas and with the non-BJI political Islamic fronts. Hefazat-e-Islam: Movement for Protection of Islam A relatively unknown Islamic group – Hefazat-e-Islam Bangladesh (Protectors of Islam; hereafter HIB) 62 – rallied under the leadership of an Islamic scholar the rector (muhtamim) of the country’s largest unofficial Deobandi madrasa, Al-Jamiatul Ahlia Darul Uloom Muinul Islam, also known as Hathazari Madrasa) and came out into the streets with their followers demanding capital punishment of the accused bloggers for their blasphemous writings. The continued street protests and agitation by HIB, which was believed to have received strong patronage from BNP and BJI in a political context when both parties had been engaged in anti-government movements prior to the next general election of the country, moved the public attention away from the Shahbag’s demands for the capital punishment of the accused Islamists and a ban on BJI, to tweaking Islamic sentiments. HIB called upon the people of the country through various publications, such as open letters, See, ‘Bangladesh Blogger Slain as Protests Sweep Capital’, Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2013, accessed Feb 16, 2013. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732416230457830751406 3033402.html; ‘Blogger Brutally Killed’, Daily Star, February 16, 2013, accessed November 11, 2004. http://archive.Daily Star.net/newDesign/news-details.php?nid=269336. 62 During fieldwork in Bangladesh in September 2009, I found HIJ, as a group of Islamic scholars mainly from different unofficial Qaumi madrasas in Chittagong city, were organizing periodical meetings at the Hathazari madrasa to devise their agenda on protecting Islam and Islamic culture in the country. The group came to be known only after the protests against the reinstitution of secularism as a state principle and the introduction of more secularized education and gender equality policies. See, ‘Unknown Islamists Group Flexes Its Muscles in CTG’, Daily Star, February 25, 2010. Accessed Feb 30, 2010. http://archive.Daily Star.net/ newDesign/news-details.php?nid=127788. 61

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advertisements, and commentaries, to join their protests against the ‘atheists’, including some of the architects of the Shahbag Movement. 63 The arrests of the accused bloggers, however, could not satisfy HIB, and they vilified the BAL government as cohorts of atheists and pressed a thirteen-point demand that did not just include the punishment of the bloggers but also the introduction of a blasphemy law, 64 reinstatement of ‘absolute trust and faith in the Almighty Allah’ in the constitution, declaring the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect to be non-Muslim, a ban on introducing foreign culture, including free mingling of men and women and candlelit vigils, repealing new ‘anti-Islamic’ women and education policies, introduction of mandatory Islamic education from primary to higher secondary levels, a ban on the erection of sculptures in public places and colleges and universities, and a ban on NGOs and Christian missionaries that target to convert Muslims. 65 The thirteen-point demand included many of the issues for which both the Islamists and the traditional ulama had been struggling for years, principally targeting the Bangladeshi state as the central power in defining the role of Islam in representing the collective identity of the Bengali Muslims and in demarcating the limit of secular principles and cultural traditions. As I have shown elsewhere, Islamic scholars associated with unrecognized madrasas had transformed their religious roles into a political one by organizing protests and movements under various organizational banners and by making demands, such as calling for the Ahmadiyya Muslim sect to be declared non-Muslim, the installation of sculptures be banned and that NGOs’ ‘anti-Islamic’ activities be ‘Sorkar o Deshbasir Proti Shaikhul Islam Allama Ahmad Shafir Khola Chitti’, Amar Desh, Feb 19, 2013, Dhaka. 64 See, ‘Bangladesh Islamists Rally for Blasphemy Law’, CNN, April 8, 2013, accessed April 9, 2013. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/06/ world/asia/bangladesh-blasphemy-protest/index.html. 65 ‘Govt. Given Three Weeks: Hefazat Announces Fresh Programmes to Realise 13 Demands’, Daily Star, April 7, 2013, accessed on May 11, 2014. http://archive.Daily Star.net/beta2/news/govt-given-threeweeks/ 63

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 401 prohibited in Bangladesh. 66 HIB’s outcry for a more Islamized society and culture, therefore, was not unleashed just in response to the secular-national and cultural iconoclasm of the Shahbag Movement, or to the freedom of thought of the bloggers. Rather, the religious sentiment manipulated by anti-government political forces and their partisan media groups created a space for the Islamists and the ulama beyond BJI to join the political battlefield against the government, and in this battle they came out with their long cherished demands for Islamizing the society. On the other hand, the government upheld the secular democratic policy by rejecting all the demands HIB put forward. Such policy, according to the Prime Minister, would also not allow anyone to hurt religious sentiment: This country is a secular democracy. So each and every religion has the right to be practiced freely and fairly. But it is not fair to hurt anybody’s religious feelings…Secularism does not mean religionlessness. 67

The present Premier, Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of Sheikh Mujib, reiterated the notion of secularism what her father interpreted just after independence. In this context, HIB, with moral and material support from opposition political forces, organized a massive protest rally in Dhaka in May 2013, in which thousands of followers, mostly from madrasas, attended. The rally turned violent when the protesters vandalized public property, and the government’s law-enforcers dispersed them, assuming the protests ultimately sought to oust the government, a political agenda already maintained by the two political rivals of the government: the BNP and BJI. The clash caused the deaths of several people, while the H. Kabir, ‘Replicating the Deobandi Model of Schooling: The Case of a Quomi Madrasa in a District Town of Bangladesh’, Contemporary South Asia, 17/4 (2009), pp. 419–421; H. Kabir, Politics of Islam, the State, and the Contested Cultural Identity: Ulama’s Activism in Postcolonial Bangladesh, Marased 2, Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Pamphlet, (Alexandria, 2012), pp. 26–31. 67 ‘No Blasphemy Law Needed: Hasina Tells BBC Existing Law Enough to Punish Offenders’, Daily Star, April 09, 2013, accessed April 9, 2013. http://www.DailyStar.net/beta2/news/no-blasphemy-law-required/ 66

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HIB and its supporter claimed the government was exaggerated the number of casualties. 68 What followed from this was an unofficial political alliance among the anti-government opposition political forces – BNP, BJI, and HIB despite their different political ideologies and agendas – as reflected in the country’s municipal elections, held in the months after the HIB’s protest, in which they utilized religion as a means of electoral success against the BALbacked candidates, who were defeated miserably. 69 Despite the BAL-government’s reinstitution of secularism as a constitutional principle, religion as a means of gaining political ascendancy continues to dominate power politics among the political elites of both the Islamic and liberal-democratic fronts.

CONCLUSION

The universal mode of the formation and spread of the‘imagined community’ – nationalism, as argued in Anderson’s (1983) celebrated study – ignores the difference of the historical realities of the colonial societies with the West. 70 Nationalism in colonial societies, as contended by Chaterjee, is articulated not only in the political struggle but also in cultural aspiration, and the domain of cultural nationalism could explain the difference in the meaning of nationalism in colonial societies and in the West. 71 In light of this theoretical premise, cultural nationalist aspiration, in which religion tends to be a defining factor, can intertwine with political nationalism and lead the formation of collective national identity, as illustrated in this study. Pakistani nationalism, imagined on the basis of an Islamic nationhood of the Muslims in the Indian ‘Clashes over Bangladesh Protest Leave 27 Dead’, BBC News Asia, May 6, 2013, accessed May 7, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/worldasia-22423815 69 See Kamran Reza Chowdhury, ‘Religious Propaganda will Affect National Polls too’, Dhaka Tribune, June 17, 2013, accessed Dec 24, 2014. http://www.dhakatribune.com/politics/2013/jun/17/religiouspropaganda-will-affect-national-polls-too-analysts 70 Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, (Princeton, 1993), pp. 4–5 (emphasis original). 71 Ibid. 68

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 403 subcontinent, attempted to subsume all other ethnic, linguistic, and regional identities. This had been galvanized with the causes of political and economic interests of the minority Indian Muslims against the majority Hindu dominant classes and political leadership. The Bengali-Muslim people who wanted to escape from the political and economic exploitations of the imperial rule and the Hindu landlords found the Pakistani Muslim nationhood as a political choice for establishing their rights. However, the Islamic nationhood as defined by the elite Muslim modernists during the pre-independence period of Pakistan appeared as a hegemonic tool of political and cultural exploitation at the hands of the Urduspeaking West Pakistani rulers in the post-independence period. Thus, the beginning of the cultural resistance to Islamic hegemony led to new forms of political discourse and to forces against the Pakistani rulers. Bengali nationalism is the product of the hegemonic and forceful Islamizing culture that coupled with the economic and political rights of the Bengali people. For its national resistance to the forced Islamization and communal policy that aimed to bring the Bengali people into the fold of Pakistani Muslim nationhood, the discourses and ideology of Bengali nationalism took the secular, non-communal, and inclusive religious route in the formation of national identity and state principles. But the military regime ‘nationalized’ Islam as a defining force that politically and religiously differentiated the Bangladeshi nation from India. This was somewhat similar to the regime of West Pakistani rulers in pre-independence Bangladesh, which sought to construct Pakistani Muslim nationhood, culturally, religiously, and politically, against the ‘Hindu’ India. In this political dynamic of religion, both as cultural and political force, the crisis in national identity in Bangladesh is inextricably associated with the contested nature of Bengali nationalism that sought to distinguish the people from Pakistani nationalism, and Bangladeshi nationalism that sought to differentiate the Bengali people from the ‘Hindu’ Bengali-speakers of India, and which sought to establish a closer relationship to the Muslim world. This crisis is largely constructed by Muslim democrats and modernists, who consciously manipulate Islam as a cultural force to define their political ideology and the identity of the nation. The fragmented forces of Islamism were given space to the political battlefield by those Muslims who do not

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promote the establishment of a sharia-based Islamic state, but want to use them to gain political ascendancy and state power. Therefore, it is imperative to look not just to the contradictory relationship between religion and secular nationalism, but also to the co-optation and co-habitation of the two in the peculiar postcolonial social and political realities.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Irfan Ahmad, ‘Genealogy of the Islamic state: reflections on Maududi’s political thought and Islamism’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 15, May (2009). A. S. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan and Islamic Identity: The Search for Saladin, (London, 1997). Safar Ali Akanda, Language Movement and the Making of Bangladesh, (Dhaka, 2013). BBC News Asia, ‘Bangladesh War Crimes Trial: Key Accused’, BBC News Asia, November 24, 2014. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-20970123 ———, ‘Clashes over Bangladesh Protest Leave 27 Dead’, , BBC News Asia, May 6, 2013. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-22423815 ———, “Huge Bangladesh Rally Seeks Death Penalty for War Crimes,” February 8, 2013. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21383632 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London, 1983). Government of Bangladesh, The Constitution of the Peoples’ Republic of Bangladesh, 1972, (Dhaka, 1975). Paul Brass, Language, Religion, and Politics in North India, (London, 1974). Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, (Princeton, 1993). Kamran Reza Chowdhury, ‘Religious Propaganda will Affect National Polls too’, Dhaka Tribune, June 17, 2013. http://www.dhakatribune.com/politics/2013/jun/17/religiou s-propaganda-will-affect-national-polls-too-analysts Serajul Islam Chowdhury, Bangaleer Jatiyatabad, Revised edition, (Dhaka, 2000).

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 405 Shamim Chowdhury, ‘The Politics at Play in Bangladesh War Trial’, Al Jazeera, October 29, 2014. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/10/politic s -at-play-bangladesh-war-trials-2014102953244138968.html CNN, ‘Bangladesh Islamists Rally for Blasphemy Law’, CNN, April 8, 2013. http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/06/world/asia/bangladeshblasphemy-protest/index.html.
 Constituent Assembly of Bangladesh, Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, (Dacca, 1972). Peter Custers, ‘Maulana Bhasani and the Transition to Secular Politics in East Bengal’, Indian Economic Social History Review, 47/2 (2010). Daily Star, ‘Unknown Islamists Group Flexes Its Muscles in CTG’, Daily Star, February 25, 2010. http://archive.DailyStar.net/newDesign/newsdetails.php?nid=127788 ———, ‘Caretaker System Abolished, JS passes constitution’s 15th amendment bill amid BNP’s absence’, Daily Star, July 1, 2011. ———, ‘Thousands Join Shahbag Sit-In’, Daily Star, February 7, 2013. http://archive.DailyStar.net/newDesign/newsdetails.php?nid=268142 ———, ‘Blogger Brutally Killed’, Daily Star, February 16, 2013. http://archive.DailyStar.net/newDesign/newsdetails.php?nid=269336 ———, ‘Charge Jamaat for War Crimes: Act Before March 26’, Daily Star, February 22, 2013. http://archive.DailyStar.net/newDesign/newsdetails.php?nid=270029 ———, ‘BNP Now Ridicules Shahbag Protests’, Daily Star, February 27, 2013. http://archive.DailyStar.net/newDesign/news———, ‘Govt. Given Three Weeks: Hefazat Announces Fresh Programmes to Realise 13 Demands’, Daily Star, April 7, 2013. http://archive.DailyStar.net/beta2/news/govt-given-threeweeks/

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———, ‘No Blasphemy Law Needed: Hasina Tells BBC Existing Law Enough to Punish Offenders’, Daily Star, April 09, 2013. http://www.DailyStar.net/beta2/news/no-blasphemy-lawrequired/ Amar Desh, ‘Sorkar o Deshbasir Proti Shaikhul Islam Allama Ahmad Shafir Khola Chitti’, Dhaka, Feb 19, 2013. Tanveer Fazal, ‘Religion and Language in the Formation of Nationhood in Pakistan and Bangladesh’, in Nation and National Identity in South Asia, Eds. S. L. Sharma, T. K. Oommen, (New Delhi, 2000). N. M. Harun, ‘Fifteenth Amendment Introduces Fusion of Ideologies’, BDNews24.Com, July 7, 2011, accessed July 8, 2011.
 http://opinion.bdnews24.com/2011/07/07/fifteenthamendment Ferhana Hashem, ‘Elite Conceptions of Muslim Identity: From the Partition of Bengal to the Creation of Bangladesh’, National Identities, 12, 1 (2010). Nasir Islam, ‘Islam and National Identity: The Case of Pakistan and Bangladesh’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 13/1 (1981). MD Saidul Islam, ‘‘Minority Islam’, in Muslim Majority Bangladesh: The Violent Road to a New Brand of Secularism’, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 31/1 (2011). Rafiqul Islam, ‘The Bengali Language Movement and the Emergence of Bangladesh’, in Language and Civilization Change in South Asia, Ed. Clarence Maloney, Contributions to Asian Studies-II, (The Hague,1978). Mahomed Ali Jinnah, Speeches as Governor-General of Pakistan 1947– 1948, (Karachi, n.d.). Humayun Kabir, ‘Beyond Jamaat-e-Islami: The Political Rise of the Deobandis, the Mystic Leaders, and Islamism in Bangladesh’, in Religion and Representation: Islam and Democracy, Eds. Ingrid Mattson, Paul Nesbitt-Larking, Nawaz Tahir, (Newcastle, 2015). ———, ‘Politics of Islam, the State, and the Contested Cultural Identity: Ulama’s Activism in Postcolonial Bangladesh’,

13. ISLAM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN BANGLADESH 407 Marased 2, Scholarly Peer-Reviewed Pamphlet, (Alexandria, 2012). ———, ‘Replicating the Deobandi Model of Schooling: The Case of a Quomi Madrasa in a District Town of Bangladesh’, Contemporary South Asia, 17/4 (2009). Muhammad Ghulam Kabir, Changing Face of Nationalism: The Case of Bangladesh, (Dhaka, 1995). Kashifiat’s Blog, ‘Agreed 22-Points of Ulema-e-Pakistan to Establish Islamic Sharia’, http://kashifiat.wordpress.com/2011/03/05/agreed-22points-of-ulema-e-pakistan-to-establish-islamic-shariah/ Zillur R. Khan, ‘Islam and Bengali Nationalism’, Asian Survey, 25/8 (1985). Habibul Haque Khondker, ‘The Curious Case of Secularism in Bangladesh: What is the Relevance For the Muslim Majority Democracies?’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 11/2 (2010). T.N. Madan, ‘Two Faces of Bengali Ethnicity: Muslim Bengali or Bengali Muslims’, The Developing Economies, 10/1 (1993). K.P. Misra, ‘Intra-State Imperialism: The Case of Pakistan’, Journal of Peace Research, 9/1 (1972). Chitta Ranjan Misra, ‘United Independent Bengal Movement’, in Banglapedia: National encyclopedia of Bangladesh, Eds. Sirajul Islam, Sajahan Miah, (Asiatic Society, 2014/2003). Amena A Mohsin, ‘Religion, Politics and Security: The Case of Bangladesh’, in Religious Radicalism and Security in South Asia, Eds. Satu P. Limaye, Robert G. Wirsing, Mohan Malik, (Honolulu, 2004). Tazeen M Murshid, ‘State, Nation, Identity: The Quest for Legitimacy in Bangladesh’, in The Post-colonial States of South Asia: Political and Constitutional Problems, Eds. Amita Shastri, A. Jeyaratnam Wilson, (London, 2001). Vali Nasr, ‘The Rise of ‘Muslim Democracy’, Journal of Democracy, 16/2 (2005). Philip Oldenberg, ‘‘A Place Insufficiently Imagined’: Language, Belief, and the Pakistan Crisis of 1971’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 44/4 (1985).

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Shireen Hasan Osmany, Bangladeshi Nationalism: History of Dialectics and Dimensions, (Dhaka, 1992). Prothom Alo, ‘Jamaat Nishiddher Somoi Bedhe Dilo Torunera’, February 22, 2013, Prothom Alo, February 22, 2013, accessed Nov 11, 2014. http://epaper.prothom- alo.com/view/dhaka/2013-02-22/1 M. Rashiduzzaman, ‘The Dichotomy of Islam and Development: NGOs, Women’s Development and Fatawa in Bangladesh’, Contemporary South Asia, 6/3 (1997). ———, ‘The Awami League in the Political Development of Pakistan’, Asian Survey, 10/7 (1970). ———, ‘The Liberals and the Religious Right in Bangladesh’, Asian Survey, 34/11 (1994). Ali Riaz, God Willing: The Politics of Islamism in Bangladesh, (Lanham, 2004). Asim Roy, ‘Impact of Islamic Revival and Reform in Colonial Bengal and Bengal Muslim Identity: A Revisit’, South Asia, 22, special issue (1999). Willem V. Schendel, A History of Bangladesh, (Cambridge, 2009). Howard Schuman, ‘A Note on the Rapid Rise of Mass Bengali Nationalism in East Pakistan’, American Journal of Sociology, 78/2 (1972). Donald Eugene Smith, ‘Secularization in Bangladesh’, Worldview, 16/4 (1973). Peter van der Veer, ‘Religion in South Asia’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 31 (2002). Wall Street Journal, ‘Bangladesh Blogger Slain as Protests Sweep Capital’, February 16, 2013. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324162304 5 78307514063033402.html Rabiul H. Zaki, ‘The Economist and the War Crimes Trial in Bangladesh’, Bdnews24.com, April 4, 2013, accessed April 5, 2013. http://opinion.bdnews24.com/2013/04/04/the-economistand-the-war-crimes-trial-in-bangladesh/ Muhammad Qasim Zaman, ‘Pluralism, Democracy and the ‘Ulama’, in Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization, Ed. Robert W. Hefner, (Princeton, 2005).

14. THE BROKEN MIRROR: HOW THE CONTEMPORARY JIHADIST NARRATIVE IS RE-SHAPING THE CLASSICAL DOCTRINE OF J IH AD RICCARDO REDAELLI 1 INTRODUCTION

Very few words in contemporary history have become as popular as the polysemous word jihad: probably the most controversial and debated concept presently associated with Islam. It is a verbal noun, both inspiring and frightening, which seems to overwhelm political debates about radical Islam. However, as always happens when technical terms become popular labels, jihad has become an overstretched word, an ideological banner, with an imprecise and broad significance, often disconnected from the classical doctrine, which the contemporary jihadist ideologists nonetheless refer to. Its doctrinal, legal, religious and moral boundaries are constantly contested both by Muslim and non-Muslim authors. Even more puzzling is the debate on the limits and regulations of jihad, and if jihad truly represents the Islamic version of Bellum justum. In other words, the current debate has transformed jihad into a sort of a ‘meta-concept’. One, however, that offers totally Riccardo Redaelli is the Director of the Master in Middle Eastern Studies (MIMES) of the Graduate School for Economy and International Relations (ASERI), and Director of the Center for Research on the South and the Wider Mediterranean System (CRiSSMA), Catholic University of the S. Heart, Milano (Italy). 1

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divergent narratives according to those who use it and which serves to foster political identities for a range of very different movements, from ‘religious nationalist’ groups to transnational, or ‘glocal’, ones. In this chapter, we will try to follow its historical evolution and its transformation from a multifarious concept to a codified set of legal doctrines to a powerful mobilizing ideology in the 20th century, up to its current transformation into a sort of universal brand, deprived nonetheless of an acknowledged copyright.

JIHAD IN THE QURʾAN AND IN THE HADITH COLLECTIONS

Due to the centrality of the Qurʾan within Islamic thought and law, all efforts to form a better understanding of jihad should inevitably start with it. And not surprising is the fact that everyone finds evidence in it to support his own vision and interpretation of this multifaceted concept. This is because contexts and representative discourses are crucial to the notion of tradition, an ambiguous concept that is too often reified in the popular perception, while it always represents an ongoing mix of discussions, struggles, manipulations (up to Ranger’s concept of the ‘Invention of Tradition’) ‘between various attempts at grasping meaning, between different interpretation of meanings’. 2 However, as pointed out by many authors, the ‘real meaning’ only exists in the discussion between competing interpretations. As underlined by Scott Thomas, ‘the great world religions may have fixed texts but they do not have fixed beliefs, only fixed interpretations of those beliefs’. 3 This is particularly evident in Islam (and especially within Sunni Islam), due to the absence of an organized ecclesiastical hierarchy and of a supreme theological authority (who can speak ex Alia Brahimi, Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror, (Oxford, 2010), p. 5. Concerning the concept of ‘Invention of Tradition’, see also Eric Hobsbawm, Terence O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, (Cambridge, 1992). 3 Scott Thomas, ‘The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Study of World Politics’, Millennium, 24/2 (1995), p. 294. 2

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cathedra). As pointed out by Kelsay, Islam is a living tradition: it would be a mistake to ignore its inner debates or not to consider them from an historical perspective. 4 A risk – that of reification and essentialism – well rooted in any analysis of a religion. Therefore, differences in the perceptions and reconstructions of the meanings and indications within sacred religious books represent the norm for all religious traditions. In the case of jihad, on one side it might be remembered that this word is scarcely used in the Qurʾan (around 40 times). And that it encompasses a plurality of concepts ranging from striving in the path of Allah, to a general meaning related to the effort of reaching a proper goal: a total struggle which embraces all aspects of human behavior. In particular, during the Meccan period, the root ‘j-h-d’ never refers to the concept of violent and military struggle. Furthermore, the Qurʾan more frequently refers to armed struggle with different words, such as qital. At the same time, historical evidence emphasizes the importance of war efforts to the early Muslim community after the establishment of the original umma in Medina, the so-called period of al-maghazi (the raids in the life of Muhammad). War against the polytheists of Mecca and battles of conquest were essential to protect, feed and expand the new Muslim community, so it does not surprise that several revelations by God to his Messenger deal with issues of armed conflict, and provide Muslims with detailed rules concerning war conduct, prisoners, looting, the fate of martyrs and so on. Concerning the concept of war against non-believers, the verses in Sura 9 are probably the most quoted and debated: Then, when the sacred months are over, kill the idolaters wherever you find them, take them, besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every point of observation. If they repent afterwards, perform the prayer and pay the alms, then release them. Allah is truly All-Forgiving, Merciful (9:5).

John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam, (Cambridge, MA; London, 2007), p. 4. 4

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In the same Sura, there are clear indications also about the relation towards the Ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book): 5 Fight those among the People of the Book who do not believe in God and the Last Day, do not forbid what God and his Apostle have forbidden, and do not profess the true religion until they pay the poll-tax out of hand submissively (9:29).

Generosity in fighting leads to divine rewards (ajr) and enforces solidarity among believers and their sense of confidence, which proved so important in the later military campaigns, after Muhammad’s death, against the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires. Those topics are very common in the wide hadith corpus. Some of the major collections of hadith generally include a section on the concept of jihad (often called Kitab al-Jihad). The propagation of faith through an armed struggle is clearly a central theme, although there is a growing awareness about the limits and the binding regulations of jihad, as well as the correct intention of the warrior. At the same time, from this huge material emerges a more detailed spiritual conception of warfare than in the Qurʾan, as well demonstrated in the Kitab al-Jihad by ‘Abdallah bin al-Mubarak, who underlines the spiritual, ascetic vision of an enlightened warrior. 6 The canonical Sunni collections of hadith also deal with the psychological war against the enemies of Islam, and the importance of ‘cast[ing] terror into the hearts of the unbelievers’ (as written in the Qurʾan, 3:151). This psychological aspect of war – how to make enemies feel fear and be discouraged – resounds in some of the contemporary tactics by global jihadists, who re-interpreted alBukhari’s collection, focusing on the media effects of the use of terror. 7 However, it was only with the elaboration and codification of this disorganized mass of material by Muslim jurists between the That is, Jews and Christians. Subsequently, even Zoroastrians were in some way included. 6 Abdallah b. al-Mubarak, Kitab al-Jihad, (Cairo, 1978). 7 Cfr. David Cook, Understanding Jihad, (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005), p. 16. See also Andrea Plebani’s essay in this volume. 5

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end of 8th century and the 10th, that the nature of warfare and jihad was regulated and addressed.

THE CLASSICAL CODIFICATION OF JIHAD

Classical authors of Fiqh studies seem to focus on the concept of jihad with less emphasis than we might expect, looking at the huge proliferation of contemporary studies, both within and outside the Dar al-Islam, which dispute the different concepts of this word. Given the enormous contemporary popularity of the term and the political, moral and ethical considerations deriving from its different meanings, it hardly surprises that literature is currently divided over the original and authentic meaning of the term jihad and, even more, on the possibility of finding a comprehensive definition and a translation which does not sound too controversial. On one side, many Western authors, such as Hamilton Gibb, Rudolph Peters and Bernard Lewis, 8 underline how the original concept was mainly connected with the idea of armed struggles, expansion or defense of the territory of Islam, and that most authors of the classical period referred to jihad as a military endeavor. After all, as has been underlined, the four Sunni canonical schools of jurisprudence (madhhab) during the 8th-9th centuries AD did not formalize the famous distinction between a ‘Greater jihad’ (al-jihad al-kabir) and a ‘Lesser jihad’ (al-jihad al-saghir), which derives from a generally accepted (although debated) tradition, linked to a well-known hadith. However, the idea of a Greater Jihad, which deals more with spirituality and daily life, developed especially with the end of territorial expansion and due to Sufism’s influence. Military stagnation, in other words, favored the transformation of this concept into a moral or spiritual struggle, 9 due also to the influence of the Sufi and Shi‘a thinkers, as well as to Muslim reformists of the 19th century, such as the Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Mohammedism, (Oxford, 1969), p. 116; Rudolph Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader, (Princeton, 1996), p. 187; Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, (Chicago, 1988), p. 72. 9 P. Peters, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam, p. 187. 8

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Egyptian Muhammad ‘Abduh and the Indian Ahmad Khan, as we will discuss in the following paragraphs. On the other hand, many Muslim scholars refuse this interpretation, emphasizing the spiritual flavor of this polysemous word and arguing ‘that jihad contains a wide range of meanings that is a total struggle covering all social and religious-spiritual aspects of life’. 10 The idea of jihad as essentially an armed struggle is often dismissed as distorting, since it does not highlight either the effort of searching for and teaching knowledge, or the attention given to the needs of the poor and widows. Following this perspective, therefore, jihad fi sabil Allah could be accomplished following four possible patterns: jihad of the heart (jihad bil qalb); proselytism (daʿwa), that is, jihad of the tongue, pen and knowledge; jihad of the hand (bil-yad) and of the sword (bil sayf), which represented the Lesser Jihad. The concept of armed struggle was thus confined within the Lesser jihad, which progressively evolved in a sort of ‘defensive duty’, which Western authors have considered as similar to the Western concept of Bellum justum (although Olivier Roy correctly showed the faulty theoretical premises of investigating Islamic culture with the concepts of Western culture). 11 In other words, this was not a complete transformation, but rather a progressive adaptation, which de-emphasized its purely military aspects as well as its expansionist thrust. As correctly pointed out by Michael Bonner, however, it might be futile to search for its ‘authentic’ interpretation, since ‘the origins of jihad extend over the entire span of Islamic history’, with different interpretations and disagreements amongst different schools of thought both in space and time. 12 It is also worth noting that a constant inner tension between violence and peace is deeply rooted inside this term. In any case, as already mentioned, classical Islamic jurisprudence dealt more with the codification of a detailed set of Ansari Yamamah, ‘The Shift of Jihad: Between Ideal and Historical Context’, Jurnal al-Tamaddun, 7/2 (2012), p. 137. 11 Olivier Roy, The Failure of Political Islam, (London, 1994), p. 7. 12 Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, Doctrines and Practices, (Princeton, 2006). 10

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rules, obligations and limits for jihad as the only acceptable form of warfare, clearly distinct from the war of conquest, such as harb, qital or ghazw. Since the main goal of this form of militant effort was to consolidate Dar al-Islam and its community of believers, Islamic jurists vehemently opposed all possible misuses. They thus identified the following categories against whom the khalifa might launch a proper jihad: unbelievers, apostates, rebels, groups of robbers, outlaws and dissidents from the legitimate ruler, if they represent a threat for the community. The first category, the jihad against the Kafirun (unbelievers), is explicitly mentioned in the Qurʾan, as we have seen in the previous chapter (Sura 9:5 and 9:124). However, in several hadiths included in the canonical collection, Muhammad forbade the killing of women, children, elders and slaves of the polytheists. 13 Despite some minor disagreements, the four Sunni classical madhhabs agree on those limitations, allowing only the killing of the non-believers who can effectively wage combat against the Muslim warriors, based on the verse: ‘Fight in the way of Allah those who fight you but do not transgress. Indeed, Allah does not like transgressors’ (2:190). Those persons can be taken as prisoners, but (especially according to the Malikite School) Muslims should guarantee them some form of secure living. According to Asma Asfaruddin, this interpretation of the concept of jihad became important especially with the beginning of the Umayyad epoch, since it legitimates the territorial expansion of the khalifate, representing Umayyad military activity as legitimate jihad. 14 The murtaddun (apostates) are another group whom the jihad has to be adopted against. All madhhabs prescribe the death penalty for individual apostates who refuse to return within the For instance: al-Bukhari, The Translation of the meaning of Sahih alBukhari. Arabic – English, edited by Muhammad Muhsin Khan, 9 vols., vol. IV, (Lahore, 1971) p. 148. 14 Cfr Asma Asfaruddin, Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought, (Oxford, 2013), p. 289. As a matter of fact, other authors, such as David Cook, do not share this interpretation, stating that this more aggressive interpretation of the concept of jihad is a peculiarity of the Islamic community, since its first establishment. 13

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umma in a three-day time. Much more dangerous is the apostasy of an entire social group of Muslims, since it represents a direct threat to the umma. In that case, the jihad is compulsory, if they do not recede from their betrayal, which is not only directed against the legitimate ruler (with their apostasy, they implicitly disavow the bayʿah, the oath of allegiance to the leader), but against God himself, according to the following Qurʾanic revelation: ‘Indeed, those who pledge allegiance to you [Muhammad], they are actually pledging allegiance to Allah’ (48:10). Since the colonial period, this fight against betrayers of Islam also became a powerful tool of political mobilization: a pillar in the ideology of radicalism and violent opposition against ‘corrupted regimes’, reformist intellectuals and all those Muslims who refuse to defend an imagined ‘true Islam’, as we will see in the following paragraphs. Protecting the umma and Dar al-Islam from the inner enemy has become a fard al-ʿayn, an obligation which must be performed by each individual Muslim, according to the vision of radical thinkers, such as Sayyid Qutb, Mawdudi, and many others. Then there are other categories, as already mentioned, which can be targets of a jihad effort if they represent a threat for the community: rebels, groups of robbers, outlaws and dissidents (categories which plagued the Umayyad caliphate with their continuous uprisings and unrest). 15 The dhimmis and the Ahl alKitab, too, are legitimate targets, if they break their agreements or represent a threat to the umma. A special kind of jihad is the socalled ribat. A word with a complex history and a plurality of meanings, it has been associated with the defensive effort of protecting the frontiers of Dar al-Islam.

JIHAD AS A TOOL OF MOBILIZATION

The classical doctrine of jihad, although extremely normative in its details, has never been a static tradition, as correctly pointed out by Brahimi, since it combines ‘a diversity of moral and legal sources, voices, and responses to the needs of the community. It is a On this subject, see Julius Wellhausen, The Religio-Political Factions in Early Islam, translated by R. C. Ostler, S. M. Walzer, (Amsterdam, 1975). 15

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normative framework with a moral content which is deeply rooted in history.’ 16 Far from being just a set of legal obligations, this doctrinal milieu has inspired a plurality of movements that have launched armed struggles against foreign aggression and domination, from the period of the Crusades to the Mongol invasion of the 13th century to the Western colonial domination of recent centuries. Jihad played an important role throughout the Crusade and Counter-Crusade epoch as an instrument for Sunni revival. That period represented a dramatic era for the umma, which was threatened in the Levant by the Crusaders’ efforts to regain the Holy Land (which lasted from 1096 until the fall of Acre in 1291) and the Mongol invasion of the 13th century. The impact of the Christian conquests in the Levant had, at the same time, a strategic and symbolic effect, with the loss of land at the heart of the Islamic world. In the East, the Mongol thrust was even more catastrophic, since it eventually destroyed the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258. In such a difficult epoch, the concept of jihad evolved, with new interpretations of huge importance and massive consequences in later centuries. From this period, Muslim thinkers wrote the most noteworthy essays on jihad; amongst them is Ibn Taymiyya (1263– 1328), a Syrian scholar of the Hanbali madhhab, who occupies a distinctive place in Muslim jurisprudence. He still has a paramount influence over contemporary Islamic radical activism, probably not only for his writings, but also for his conditions of effective engagement in war when the Islamic world was mortally threatened. Taymiyya combined a restless effort for encouraging jihad (detailing its laws and limitations) with a tough opposition to the new Mongol rulers (considered both infidels and false Muslims, even after their conversion). 17 In his works, the fight against heretics, unorthodox customs, and popular devotional practices went hand in hand with the struggle against deviant authorities and A. Brahimi, Jihad and Just War, p. 11. Among the vast literature on this author, I simply refer to Johannes J. G. Jansen, ‘Ibn Taymiyyah and the Thirteenth Century: A Formative Period of Modern Muslim Radicalism’, Quaderni di Studi Arabi, 5–6 (1987–1988), pp. 391–96. 16 17

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rulers. According to Paul Heck, this author created a new, more powerful Islamic identity based on ritual and common practice rather than one that was politically identified. 18 This proved an important example for future Islamic radical thought. With the expansion of European colonial power during the 18th, 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, most of the peoples of the Islamic world were directly, or indirectly, subjected to colonial domination. A kind of domination not simply confined to the military and political côte, but which represented a wide-ranging challenge to those traditional societies and cultures. In many regions of the world, therefore, political and military resistance against European imperialism wore the religious banner of defensive jihad. Peters illustrates the paramount importance of the doctrine of jihad in this resistance, although this call for jihad has often been complemented by the use of another crucial concept, that is the obligation of the hijrah (emigration). 19 Based on some Qurʾanic verses (4:97–100) and several hadiths claiming that Muhammad refused to deal with any Muslim residing amongst the polytheists, 20 many leaders of the anti-colonial movement exhorted their followers to perform hijrah, moving from a territory occupied and governed by non-Muslims (which had become Dar al-Harb after the military conquest by the Europeans) to Dar al-Islam. The most important historical example is probably represented by the so-called Hijrat Movement in India in the 1920s, when tens of thousands of Indian Muslims left the sub-continent for Afghanistan, responding to a fatwa requiring them to do so. 21 An Paul Heck, ‘Jihad revisited’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 32/1 (2004), pp. 95–128. 19 Rudolh Peters, Islam and colonialism. The doctrine of Jihad in Modern History, (The Hague, Paris, New York, 1979), p. 41. 20 This is an obligation for those able to emigrate, since they avoid living in a territory dominated by unbelievers and hence strengthen the Islamic state. However, this idea is far from being thoroughly accepted by the classic Islamic jurisprudence. The Hanafites, for instance, refuse jihad as a binding obligation. 21 Cfr. Albert C. Niemeijer, The Khilafat Movement in India, 1919–1924, (The Hague, 1972). 18

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idea which has gained an ideological flavor, with the modern radical movements that struggle to create a ‘purely’ Islamic state ruled by the rigorous implementation of the shariʾa. Implicitly, this movement anticipated the role of religion as a pillar of the new Islamic state-related identities, which intertwine loyalty to state structures with loyalty to the Islamic religious belief. 22 A clear example of the role of jihad as an element of ideological mobilization is the Tariqa-i Muhammadi, an Indian movement led by Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi (1786–1831). Created as a religious revivalist organization (whose aim was to restore pure Islam, purified of all dangerous innovations (bidaʾ)) it became a political and militant movement for fighting British rule. The concepts of jihad and hijrah were fundamental to mobilizing a plurality of ethnic and social groups of Muslims, living in different states of the Indian sub-continent, who had heavily suffered from the social and economic transformations triggered by British colonial domination. 23 For decades after their military defeat by the British and Sikhs, these ideas remained as reference points for a plurality of Muslim anti-colonial thinkers and activists within British India. To the point that Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), the famous Islamic Indian reformist of the 19th century, in his attempts to reconcile Islam and the West, contested the idea of India as a Dar al-Harb, condemning the consequent ideas of jihad and hijrah; British India, on the contrary, was a Dar al-Aman (Land of Security), since the British government of India offered protection, freedom and security to all Muslims. Jihad was therefore unlawful. 24 It would be possible to trace many other examples, from North Africa to Southeast Asia (well beyond the scope of this essay), often in association with messianic and apocalyptic narratives (often linked to the Sunni Muslim messianic figure of the Mahdi, who will re-create the unbeatable warriors of early Islam to See in this regard, the Introduction and Conclusion to this volume. On this movement, see R. Peters, Islam and colonialism, p. 46f and Aziz Ahmad, ‘Le movement des Mujahidin dans l’Inde au XIXe siècle’, Orient, 15 (1960), pp. 106–116. 24 Ahmad Khan Bahadur, Review of Dr. Hunter’s Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen?, (Benares, 1872). 22 23

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launch the final successful jihad). 25 Amongst those, the Sanusi resistance against Italian colonial occupation certainly represents one of the most intriguing cases of anti-colonial jihad. The Sanusiyya was a religious brotherhood created amongst the nomadic and transhumant Libyan tribes by Muhammad al-Sanusi (1791–1859) in the 1840s, which promoted the ‘purification’ of traditional Islamic practices in favor of a more orthodox faith, and which coexisted with the weak Turkish administrative authorities. When Italy invaded Libya in 1911, the Sanusiyya proclaimed jihad against the invaders. It is interesting to note that the Sanusi leader, Ahmad al-Sharif (1873–1933), tried to mobilize not only the local Libyan tribes, but to raise the interest and support of the whole Islamic umma, publishing the appeal to wage jihad in an Egyptian magazine in 1912. 26 In some way, this attempt appears to be a forerunner in the field of internationalizing jihadist struggles, which are so familiar to us in recent decades. However, the results of his efforts were disappointing: despite great resonance in the Muslim world for al-Sharif’s appeal, the Sanusiyya received very little practical help (de facto, this attempt happened too early, from an historical and political point of view, and with too rudimentary media channels to rely on for spreading its jihadist message). The proclamation of jihad by the Turkish religious authorities when the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet V declared war on the Triple Entente in 1914 produced ever more deluding outcomes. With five different and connected fatwas, the Ottomans tried to mobilize all the Muslim populations living under the colonial rule of their enemies, translating those appeals to jihad into all local languages, and spreading anti-Western propaganda in the colonial territories. They hoped to unsettle the British and French colonial empires, and to shake up Russian Muslim territories in the Caucasus and Central Asia. 27 But they failed: at that time, pan-Islamic sentiment David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, (Princeton, 2002). Valeria F. Piacentini, Il pensiero militare nel mondo musulmano, (Milano, 1996), pp. 80–85. 27 For an English translation of those fatwas, see Islamic Quarterly, 19 (1975), pp. 157–158. The original Turkish text can be found in Der Islam, 5 (1914), pp. 391–392. 25 26

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was still far from being politically organized, and weaker than Arab nationalism, which was primarily directed against Ottoman rule. The defense of religion and Islamic mobilization was still an idea shared by limited religious and intellectual circles that opposed the diffusion of European culture and civilization, and was less alluring than ethnic-based nationalism. 28 Nevertheless, the attempt by the Ottoman government to play simultaneously both on the supranational level and the local, exploiting frictions within the imperial territories of its enemies, is a precursor of the current ‘glocal’ attitude of post-Qaedist jihadists, as we will see in the next paragraphs.

JIHAD AND MODERNITY: THE CREATION OF A POWERFUL REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY

At the beginning of the 20th century, the picture of the Islamic world was gloomy: not only had Europe directly or indirectly subjugated most of Dar al-Islam, but Western culture – from science to technology, from educational systems to economic thinking – appeared to be superior to the traditional Islamic culture. Europeans justified their colonialist and imperialist greed with moral justifications based on the need to spread this ‘cultural superiority’: imperialism was the ‘white man’s burden’, the ‘mission civilizatrice’ of the French. The colonial experience led to the socalled Islamic Awakening or Islamic reformism, a period of intellectual revival, which in Western histories traditionally begins with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt (another blatant demonstration of Eurocentrism). During this long period, several authors tried to adjust the sclerotic, traditional interpretation of Islam (based on taqlid, imitation) with a new effort to revitalize Islamic religious thought. Amongst the many authors, the reformist Muhammad ‘Abduh (1849–1905) and the more conservative Muḥammad Rashid Rida (1865–1935), tried to radically redefine the meaning of jihad, On the complex and often contradictory relations among religious, ethno-religious and ethnic identities, see John A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, (Chapel Hill, 1982). 28

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adapting it to the new historical situation, as part of a wider attempt to rethink and reframe the traditional Islamic exegesis and legal codification. They went beyond the Sufi transformation of jihad; they insisted on the importance of the ‘Greater jihad’, the one against personal moral weaknesses. ‘Abduh and then Rida emphasized jihad as a defense of religion in the sense that it represents the ‘proclamation of truth and the removal of the distortion and misinterpretation’. 29 It is a clear spiritualization of jihad, transported to a more intellectual and ethical dimension, as a proclamation of the divine truth, while its ‘warfare dimension should be interpreted in the most limited and defensive manner possible’. 30 After the end of the First World War, a huge delusion with European policy spread all over Dar al-Islam, from the Indian subcontinent to the Levant. The colonial partition of the Arab territories of the collapsed Ottoman Empire (behind the hypocritical principle of the League of Nations mandates) and the refusal to accept local demands for political autonomy and powersharing throughout the vast colonial Empire led to a reframing of the Islamic reformist movements and to a rethinking of their goals and methods. Those delusions led to a radicalization of nationalistic demands as well as to a less open attitude towards European culture, in favor of a more apologetic approach toward Islam and its tradition. In such a new cultural and political environment, even the meaning of jihad required adjustment. The renowned founders of the two most influential movements of the 20th century within the Islamic world, that is, Hasan al-Banna (founder of the Jamaʾat alʾikhwan al-muslimun, the Muslim Brotherhood) and maulana Abu al’Ala Mawdūdī (founder of the Indian Jamaʾat-e-Islami) in their writings obviously dealt with jihad. Both of them (but Mawdūdī in particular) conveyed the basis for an apologetic thought concerning jihad. Al-Banna stressed the importance of jihad in his famous Rashid Rida, Fatawa al-Imam Muhammad Rashid Rida, III, (Beirut, 1970), p. 1156. 30 D. Cook, Understanding, p. 97. 29

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Risalat al-Jihad 31 as a religious duty for all Muslims. However, it should not be considered a tool of aggression, nor as a vehicle for their personal desires, but an effort to protect the revelation and the diffusion of Islam (daʾwah), as a surety for peace, and as a means to fulfill ‘the great mission’ (al-risalat al-kubra). 32 Nevertheless, in the same text, he attacked the widespread belief that armed jihad represents only the ‘Lesser Jihad’, according to a traditional vision that we have already discussed above. According to him, this tradition relies on an apocryphal hadith. In any case, wrote al-Banna, ‘even if this tradition were authentic, it cannot divert any Muslim either from jihad, or from organizing the defense of Dar al-Islam’. 33 Despite his formal adherence to a pan-Islamic vision, however, with al-Banna and his association we start to see that ‘national’, state-centered dimension of political and religious narratives, which will characterize most of the Islamist revival and mobilization in the last decades of the 20th century (as widely described in this volume). The Indian Muslim thinker, although probably less known in the West, nonetheless played an even bigger role in the reformulation of the concept of jihad, and in its adaptation to a contemporary world based on the idea of nation states, a legacy of European imperialism. Mawdudi (1904–1979) devoted himself to strenuously fighting against the influence of European cultural and political ideas upon Muslim elites. He strongly opposed Western civilization, contaminated by materialism, secularism, and atheism, and by the idea of nationalism as well. In his book The Sick Nations of the Modern Age, 34 he underlined how nationalism was poisoning Islamic activism, which should instead be strictly confined within a pan-Islamic approach. That was the raison d’être of Mawdudi’s opposition to the idea of Pakistan, to the point that Pakistani authorities arrested him, after the partition of India in 1947. Cfr. Hasan al-Banna, Risalat al-Jihad, in Majmuʿa Rasaʾil al-Imam alShahid Hasan al-Banna, (Alexandria, 1979). 32 Ibid., pp. 283–284. 33 Ibid., pp. 289–290. 34 Abu al-’Ala Mawdudi, The Sick Nations of the Modern Age, (Lahore, 1966). 31

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Ironically, after being released, Mawdudi heavily influenced Pakistan’s constitutional evolution, completely transforming Muhammad ‘Ali Jinnah’s idea of Pakistan as a secular, pro-Western state. In fact, he inspired the 1956 constitution that paved the way for the transformation of the country and the re-introduction of shariʾa principles, religious courts and schools. Jihad played a fundamental role in this effort to Islamize state structures and principles. The ‘true’ jihad, he stressed, not the distorted vision that Westerners have spread of jihad as ‘holy war’ and ‘fanaticism’: this is an image of jihad popularized during colonial times to favor conversion to Christianity and to denigrate Islam, as he frequently wrote. But it cannot be reduced just to a personal, peaceful fight against our wrong inclinations, as suggested by Sufi thought or by the Islamic reformists. On the contrary, in Mawdudi’s thinking, it becomes a sort of revolutionary call to worship God, and God alone. 35 Jihad, in other words, becomes a powerful revolutionary ideology of mobilization against unjust social, economic and political systems and a response to illegitimate and tyrannical rulers. Islamic mobilization is an essential step to achieving social justice and real freedom; a drastic departure from the classical concept of jihad we have seen in the previous paragraphs. Daʾwah (invitation), that is, the proselytising and the diffusion of (real) Islam, represents for him the most powerful jihad, since it activates believers’ consciousness of living in an unjust world and the need to struggle to change it. Thus, Islam becomes a universal, ideological and revolutionary movement to achieve social justice and freedom, and jihad is the main tool for spreading this message. 36 All debates on ‘defensive’ jihad – ‘Lesser’ and ‘Greater’ efforts – became irrelevant in this new perspective: it is at the same time both an offensive and defensive principle. Muslims should fight against all political systems incompatible with Islamic values, D. Cook, Understanding, p. 100. Abu al-’Ala Mawdudi, Jihad in Islam, (Lahore, 1976), pp. 5–7. On this thinker, see also Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, (Oxford, 1996). 35 36

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aiming to destroy them. They should then build a new, viable order, defending and spreading God’s rules. His ideas and visions, deeply influenced Islamic thinkers all over the Muslim world, from the leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeyni (1902–1989), to the Egyptian ideologist of the Jamaʾat al-ʾikhwan al-muslimun, Sayyid Quṭb (1906–1966). The latter, in particular, took from Mawdudi this innovative meaning of jihad. As with the Indian Muslim intellectual, even Qutb is hardly interested in the classical elements of this doctrine, since he moves from a peculiar vision of the contemporary Dar al-Islam conditions, which echoed the gloomy visions of Ibn Taymiyya (whose writings are a standard reference for radical Islamist and jihadists, together with Qutb’s). According to him, the true Islamic society, which existed at the time of Medina and during the four ‘al-rashidun’ Caliphs, has vanished. Muslims today live in a condition of moral and religious bankruptcy, following corrupted, anti-Islamic, nihilist doctrines: a new state of Ignorance, a new Jahiliyya. To fight against this voluntary apostasy of a whole community and in order to re-Islamize Muslim societies, jihad is necessary, meaning a revolutionary action ‘to announce the liberation of man’. 37 Despite his persistence in asserting that jihad is not coercion or traditional warfare, he went beyond Mawdudi’s narrative, accepting the idea of violence and military action, in particular against apostate rulers who are intoxicating the Muslim world and demonstrated the aggressive stance of anti-Islamic forces. Furthermore, since Qutb perceived peace and freedom only within the Qurʾanic concept ‘when religion is entirely Allah’s’ (Qurʾan 8:39), the expansionist, worldwide dimension of jihad becomes more evident, although not explicitly proclaimed. From this perspective, the traditional elements of the classical doctrine, based on territories to be defended or enlarged in the name of God, are becoming de facto irrelevant: the arena is the entire word, and with so many apostate rulers, it becomes meaningless to focus on borders. Atheist and materialist world 37

Sayyid Qutb, Maʿalim fi-l-tariq, (Beirut – Cairo, 1981), p. 55.

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systems are depriving humankind of the possibility of choosing God: jihad therefore becomes an obligation. Qutb’s execution, ordered by Jamal ‘Abdel Naser in 1966, transformed him into a martyr, contributing to the popularity of his writings and ideas. The thinking of all those activists, together with the model offered by Khomeyni’s successful revolution against the shah in Iran, offered a powerful ideology of mobilization to a plurality of opposition movements throughout the Dar al-Islam. The failure of ideologies based on alien patterns of Western modernization – on liberalism or Marxist theories – combined with the delusional hopes following the end of the colonial period, offered this politicized narrative of Islamic mobilization room for maneuver. Islamic activism was the answer to the failure of decolonization and the instrument for fighting against economic and political inequality in the name of human freedom and social justice. As has been called a new ‘theology of discontent’ for mobilizing the millions who lived in degraded conditions under repressive, corrupt and illiberal governments. 38 And jihad was a pillar of this activism. The abysmal failures of modernization and offering responses to the needs of their populations, as well as their military humiliation by Israel, put Middle Eastern regimes in an increasingly difficult position. They were unable to cope with the fast demographic growth of their populations, large-scale urbanization, demands for basic needs (especially housing, healthcare and education), political representation and economic growth. A growing portion of the population within the Muslim countries, frustrated by events, felt the attractiveness of radical Islamist narratives on what ‘went wrong’ (that is, the perceived betrayal of ‘real Islam’). In almost all Muslim countries, Islamic movements and parties thus proliferated, following the teachings of al-Banna, Mawdudi and Qutb, and trying to replicate the success of ayatollah Although Hamid Dabashi’s title, Theology of Discontent, focuses only on the Iranian Shi‘a experience, all of the expansive phase of what is sometimes called the political Islam of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s fits within this fascinating label. Cf. Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent. The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, (New York, 1993). 38

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Khomeyni in establishing new Islamic states. For reaching this goal, jihad was essential; a particularly assertive and aggressive version of jihad – a revolutionary effort directed towards overthrowing corrupt and apostate regimes and autocrats. The struggle required para-military activism against external, as well as internal, enemies and due to its urgency, this effort became an ‘individual obligation’ (fard al-ʾayn). Particularly interesting in this regard is the view of Muḥammad ‘Ab al-Salam Faraj, the Egyptian author of the militant pamphlet al-Farida al-ghaʾiba (The Neglected Duty). 39 Faraj took Qutb’s dichotomist vision between what is purely Islamic and what goes against Islam to the extreme and also underlined the importance of jihad for establishing an ‘Islamic state and for the revival of the historical caliphate of the Rightly-Guided Rulers’. 40 His pamphlet fueled violent Islamic activism and is interesting in that, despite radical Islamists’ adherence to the Caliphate doctrine, most of those movements dealt essentially with a state-centered vision, as extensively discussed in this volume. This change in focus appears easily understandable: while mobilization under colonialism was primarily devoted to the purposes of liberation and/or the purification of teachings and practices, ‘after decolonization, jihad was primarily invoked with reference to rebelling against secular tyrannical rulers at home, where “oppression” was routinely elided with “aggression”’. 41 The focus was thus inside the Dar al-Islam and inside each Islamic country, offering opposition movements and protesters against their autocratic rulers a familiar frame of reference, represented by Islam and its traditions. The return to a mythical ‘true interpretation’ of Islam and the rigorous adoption of its Law was the simple response to the humiliation, fragmentation and weakness of the Muslim world. And militant jihad was obviously a pillar of this return. Interestingly, this insistence on a pan-Islamic perspective (often combined with a vague idea of the return to the See Johannes J.G. Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East, (London, 1986). 40 A. Asfaruddin, Striving in the Path of God, p. 216. 41 Alia Brahimi, Jihad and the Just War, (Oxford, 2010), p. 107. 39

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caliphate) boosted the rise and growth of a plurality of opposition movements within established Muslim states, which acted mainly within an essentially national perspective. In some cases, such as in Egypt under Sadat at the beginning of the 1970s, in Jordan or in Indonesia, this growth had been favored by the regimes themselves, since Islamic activism was considered less dangerous for political stability than leftist and Marxist organizations, which appeared to be weakened by Islamist growth. This was a political miscalculation based on a gross underestimation of the capacity of Islamic radical narratives to attract, catalyze and radicalize disparate political opposition and socio-economic discontent, integrating them into a bipolar agenda combining the Islamization of society with a reformist perspective. However, despite their mobilization, determination and popular support, most of the contested regimes have been able to deal with the Islamist challenge, thanks to a plurality of different politics, often mixed together, ranging from brutal repression, social and religious concessions, political cooption and patronclient networks (supported by external financing). During the second half of the 1990s, most of those movements appeared to be trapped between governments’ successful repression and a further radicalization of their agendas, which often led to their fragmentation and political marginalization, as always happens when opposition narratives become too radical and violent. 42

FROM ORGANIZED ISLAMISM TO GLOBAL AND THEN GLOCAL JIHAD

The so-called ‘failure of political Islam’ 43 (to use contested terminology) created large cadres of dissatisfied Islamists who could not foresee a way to take power in their countries of origin, either through a cooperative approach with the existing regimes or by violent confrontation. Broader international politics unwittingly came to their rescue: first the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in Cfr Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, (Cambridge, 2002). Original edition : Jihad: espansion et déclin de l’islamisme, (Paris, 2000). 43 Olivier Roy, L’échec de l’Islam politique, (Paris, 1992). 42

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1979 and then the Gulf War of 1991, with the consequent creation of permanent US bases within the Arabian Peninsula (in addition to the occupation of Palestinian territories by Israel). These events offered an inviting way out, reactivating an imaginary landscape of jihad based on the myth of the classical jihadi literature. The champion of this new phase, based on the concept of global jihad, is obviously the movement created by Osama bin Ladin and other militant Islamists, al-Qaʾida, whose analysis goes far beyond the scope of this essay. The message of this organization, while simple and direct, maximized its impact on the Muslim community, shaping new modes of militant mobilization: a successful mix of quest for martyrdom and religious indoctrination with post-modern adaptability and the use of information technology. The basic idea is that all of Islam is under attack by a broad Christian-Judaic alliance, which is sustained by takfiri leaders within the Muslim world, who betrayed their religion and citizens to serve the powerful Westerners. This coalition is able to hit the umma, both from outside and inside, utilizing military as well as non-military tools. The only answer is to fight a defensive jihad (generally quoting Ibn Taymiyyah), which should be directed simultaneously against the near (or inner) enemy (that is, the corrupted regimes of the Muslim world) and the ‘far enemy’, that is, the West. Although Osama bin Ladin became, especially after the infamous 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York, the eponymous father of contemporary jihadists, other thinkers are more important from a theoretical perspective. The first of them is ‘Abdullah ‘Azzam (1941–1989), a Palestinian affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, who founded the Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Office), a platform that played a crucial role in Pakistan and Afghanistan for organizing the mujaheddin war against the Soviet occupation during the 1980s. After courses in Islamic studies, he obtained a Ph.D. in Islamic jurisprudence from the prestigious al-Azhar University, but moved to Pakistan. The basis of his theory is that the ‘defense of the Muslim lands is the first obligation after faith’ (to quote the first of a long series of books, essays, sermons and conferences, generally distributed as

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pamphlets and later via the internet). 44 This is not only a fard khifaya – an obligation for Islamic society – but a more binding fard al-ʾayn, a personal obligation for every Muslim. He clearly recalled Qutb and Faraj’s idea of jihad, but he focused it more against the external enemy, instead of against the inner (near) one. His famous slogan: ‘Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences, and no dialogues’ sets the frame of action for the mujahidin, whose main effort is to defend the Dar al-Islam from military aggression. He also contributed to spreading the idea of martyrdom among Sunni militants (the concept of shahid, or martyr, was a typical shi‘ite notion, which Khomeyni had transformed into a powerful ideological and political factor). However, ‘Azzam, probably due to his orthodox studies of Islamic jurisprudence, was clearly against transforming jihad into a ruthless fight without limits and rules: mujahedin were not murderers. The classical doctrine of jihad is here still clearly shaping ‘Azzam’s thought: the fight in Afghanistan represented the first step of a long march toward the liberation of all current and formerly Muslim lands. But he is against the use of indiscriminate terror: all the detailed limitations elaborated by the schools of jurisprudence and law obviously still represent a doctrinal obligation. On the contrary, those limitations did not represent an obstacle for another thinker of the global jihad doctrine, the Egyptian physician and ideologue Ayman al-Zawahiri, who influenced Osama bin Ladin’s thinking and assumed the position of head of al-Qaʾida after bin Laden’s death. As demonstrated by his famous letter to Abu Mus’ab alZarqawi, he believed that the Arab masses ‘do not rally except against an outside occupying enemy […] the sectarian factor is secondary in importance to outside aggression’. 45 From this perspective al-Zawahiri follows the idea, which became so popular at the end of the 19th century thanks to the interpretation of the Islamic modernists (cfr. par. 4), of jihad as defensive warfare. An For ‘Azzam’s publication and thought, I rely on Gilles Kepel (ed.), Al Qaeda in Its Own Words, (Cambridge, 2008), original edition: Al-Qaida dans le texte, (Paris, 2005), pp. 81–146. 45 A. Brahimi, Jihad and the Just War, p. 106. 44

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idea obsessively formulated by qaedist leaders, and by bin Ladin in particular, in many interviews and appeals: they claimed that they were only defending themselves from the aggression of the United States and its allies, the perfect ‘just cause’ for bellum justum theory. But for al-Zawahiri and bin Ladin, defensive warfare does not mean that mujahidin are bound to fight only within the attacked territories of the Dar al-Islam. On the contrary, they appeal to the concept of reciprocity, stressing the legitimacy of attacking the West, since the West is attacking us. The Egyptian ideologist, in a letter to the British people, wrote, ‘you have created rivers of blood [in our Land], so we blew up volcanoes of rage in your countries’. 46 Even if they attack civilians in the West, it is still a defensive jihad, since they were only reacting to previous aggression. At the same time, they reinforced a Manichean, dichotomist vision of the relations between West and the Muslim world, as based on an inevitable clash of civilizations. An idea which hardly seems to fit with the reiterated concept that if the West ends its attempts at destroying Islam, they will stop their counter-attacks, as often proclaimed, probably looking to the modernist interpretation of jihad as a mere defensive task. But al-Qaʿida and al-Zawahiri needed to find a doctrinal justification for the atrocity of their retaliations, which go against both classical limitations as well as modern thinkers’ insistence that force should be used only when unavoidable (as written by Mawdudi and Qutb), and only after proper invitations to convert to Islam and to make peace have been addressed to the enemy. That is the explanation of the reiterated warnings by qaedist leaders to Western politicians and populations to end their atrocities against Islam: clearly visible is the effort to keep their actions within the canonical framework of jihad. Concerning the violence against civilians, women and children killed during their terroristic attacks, they again rely on the argument of reciprocity (the West is slaughtering unarmed, harmless Muslims throughout the Dar al-Islam), as well as on the idea that violence is the only language understood by the United States. Bin Ladin described the West as a crocodile devouring 46

Al-Zawahiri message to the British people, 4 August 2005.

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Muslims, which ‘does not understand anything else but weapons’. 47 The violation of classical regulations and limits in fighting the jihad is thus a consequence of the urgency of the fight, and a necessity as the only possible answer to a mortal threat against Islam. Similarly, qaedism needed a justification for the flagrant violation of the Islamic refusal of self-killing. Unlike Japanese kamikazes or the ritual practice of kara-kiri, which are strictly connected with traditional religious and philosophical codes, suicide jihadists go against their tradition (a tradition supported by specific Qurʾanic prescriptions, hadiths, and jurisprudence). AlZawahiri renamed such acts ‘martyrdom operations’, clarifying that the intention (niyya) of the mujahidin is crucial. Their self-killing cannot be a consequence of their despair; on the contrary it is a sacrifice to the cause of Allah, which is the highest and noblest sacrifice. 48 An idea further refined by Yusuf al-’Ayyiri, another influential jihadist theorist, who refuses the term ‘suicide operations’, stressing their difference from the more appropriate concept of self-sacrificing to bring victory to Islam and give strength to the faith. This can be said to be a weak interpretation, which al-Zawahiri tried to reinforce with the so-called ‘Boy and the King’ hadith, a reference which is, however, considered extremely debatable upon closer analysis. 49 The ‘post-qaedist jihad’ warfare, launched by al-Zarkawi and more recently by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, further derails from the codified vision of jihad. Andrea Plebani’s chapter in this book deals extensively with this topic, which I only refer to. Here, I simply wish to underline how their vision of religious warfare reversed the predominance of the jihad against the external enemy, in favor of a focus against the internal enemy, identified not by political markers, but mainly by sectarian considerations. This represents a new pattern of jihadism, which is deeply influencing the concept of Osama Bin Laden’s interview with al-Jazeera, December 1998. Ayman al-Zawahiri, ‘Jihad and he Superiority of Martyrdom’, in The Al-Qaeda Reader, Ed. Raymond Ibrahim, (New York, 2007), p. 156. 49 For a detailed analysis of the jihadist re-interpretation of this hadith Cfr. A. Brahimi, Jihad and the Just War, pp. 168–9. A. Afsaruddin, Striving in the Path of God, p. 264. 47 48

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global jihad. 50 All ‘global jihadists’ reject the idea of the nation state in favor of a utopic return to the original khalifate. However, the most recent events, with the proliferation of ‘Islamic emirates’ and the new khalifate proclaimed by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, after his military victories in Syria and Central-Western Iraq in 2014, show how the ‘national’ narrative is more difficult to eradicate than it appears: despite the rhetorical insistence on their adherence to the pan-Islamic vision, the new jihadist movements seem engulfed in a ‘glocal’ (global and local) perspective, driven by sectarian, tribal and local hostilities and aspirations. Still a far cry from the classical tradition they refer to.

CONCLUSION

As we have seen, the concept and meaning of jihad has continuously evolved and changed through history. A rather obvious process for such an important and evocative term, which, as correctly pointed out by Michael Bonner, ‘is more than a set of legal doctrines’. 51 No doubts about this self-evident fact: indeed, jihad cannot be reduced solely to a set of obligations and limitations. However, it is questionable whether it can survive as a coherent concept beyond and beside its codified doctrinal frame, especially if the concept of jihad is associated with practices that clearly conflict with that framework and contradict its inner logic, such as the ones implemented by global jihadists. It is evident that contemporary jihadists are activists with little knowledge of their religion’s holy texts: their channels of radicalization and militancy run more through the web rather than through mosques or formal theological studies. However, all radical Islamic and jihadist thinkers of the 20th century tried to maintain at least a formal adherence to the inspiring principles of jihad and to the codified doctrinal and legal pillars of classical Islam, mainly to strengthen their ideologies and to avoid the accusation of bidʾa, or Andrea Plebani (ed.), New (and old) patterns of jihadism: al-Qaʿida, the Islamic State and beyond, (Milano, 2014). 51 M. Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History, p. 5. 50

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‘innovation’, an Arabic word that carries a very negative connotation, close to that of religious heresy. At the same time, however, this effort to demonstrate their adherence to the Islamic theological mainstream underlines the distance of their thought and practices from the codified rules for fighting a legitimate jihad. There is hardly any possibility of reconciling the slaughtering of Shi‘a and Arab Christian women and children by the sectarian movements created in the Levant by al-Zarkawi and Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi, or the massacres of unarmed civilians in the West by qaedist groups with the judicial logic codified during the first Islamic centuries by the Sunni madhhab. What jihad has become is therefore a powerful ideology of political and paramilitary mobilization, a successful tool for different ‘theologies of discontent’ or, more recently, for the sectarian war within the Islamic world. Following this structural transformation (much more than a simple adaptation to modernity) this polysemic word is facing a further mutation: despite their insistence on a pan-Islamic perspective, and their dogmatic adherence to the idea of a return to the original caliphate, since the 20th century the Islamic radical militancy boosted the rise and growth of a plurality of opposition movements within defined Muslim states. Even nowadays, jihadist discourses and actions, from Afghanistan to the Levant, to Yemen or Libya, cannot escape a (sub-)national perspective, mixing a vague globalist narrative with specific and well-rooted local triggers of conflict and political aims. The already mentioned ‘glocal’ approach of post–qaedist groups seems therefore an unavoidable consequence of the lack of real perspectives of the anti-nationalistic rhetoric, as the troubles between ‘local’ fighters and foreign mujahidins in Iraq and Syria underline. The ‘national’ perspective has been largely internalized in a world of ‘states and nations’, although we can deny it, and the trap of the ‘Us vs Other’ dichotomy is more powerful and embedding than the religious proclaims. Balancing between local and global forces and activists, therefore, will became a decisive factor for the Caliphate in the Levant, as well as for the variety of Islamic Emirates created within weak, failing states. Furthermore, their obsessive appeals for fighting against the external (non-Muslim) enemy and their evocation of the original mythical unity of the umma appears more like a powerful

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‘advertising medium’ for obtaining financial and military support (especially in terms of foreign fighters), and, at the same time, an ideological mask for covering much more prosaic political goals. They are now struggling to transform it into a sort of mythomoteur, that is the constitutive myth that provides a social group with the necessary sense of purpose and being. It is too early for an answer, but without linking the jihad to a set of territorial roots, jihadism as a constitutional pillar appears to be a very risky gamble. And having broken the mirror of classical jihad doctrine, contemporary jihadists can now only rely on deforming fragments that have almost no relation with the codified concept they refer to. Those fragments might offer them contingent, short-lived success, and might attract a plurality of followers. At the same time, the same radical narrative that favors their popularity represents an obstacle for their stabilization and institutionalization, while they force official voices of Islam to deny their claims and vision, and re-group territorial, institutionalized actors against them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aziz Ahmad, ‘Le movement des Mujahidin dans l’Inde au XIXe siècle’, Orient, 15 (1960). Hasan al-Banna, Risalat al-Jihad, in Majmuʿa Rasaʾil al-Imam al-Shahid Hasan al-Banna, (Alexandria, 1979). al-Bukhari, The Translation of the meaning of Sahih al-Bukhari, Arabic – English, edited by Muhammad Muhsin Khan, 9 vols., (Lahore, 1971). Abdallah b. al-Mubarak, Kitab al-Jihad, (Cairo, 1978). Ayman al-Zawahiri, ‘Jihad and the Superiority of Martyrdom’, in The Al-Qaeda Reader, Ed. Raymond Ibrahim (New York, 2007). John A. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, (Chapel Hill, 1982). Asma Asfaruddin, Striving in the Path of God: Jihad and Martyrdom in Islamic Thought, (Oxford, 2013). Ahmad Khan Bahadur, Review of Dr. Hunter’s Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen?, (Benares, 1872). Michael Bonner, Jihad in Islamic History. Doctrines and Practices, (Princeton, 2006).

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Alia Brahimi, Jihad and Just War in the War on Terror, (Oxford, 2010). Cook, David, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, (Princeton, 2002). ———, Understanding Jihad, (Berkeley – Los Angeles, 2005). Hamid Dabashi, Theology of Discontent. The Ideological Foundation of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, (New York, 1993). Hamilton A. R. Gibb, Mohammedism, (Oxford, 1969). Paul Heck, ‘Jihad revisited’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 32/1 (2004). Eric Hobsbawm, Terence O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, (Cambridge, 1992). Johannes J. G. Jansen, ‘Ibn Taymiyyah and the Thirteenth Century: A Formative Period of Modern Muslim Radicalism’, Quaderni di Studi Arabi, 5–6 (1987–1988). ———, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East, (London, 1986). John Kelsay, Arguing the Just War in Islam, (Cambridge, MA; London, 2007). Gilles Kepel (ed.), Al Qaeda in Its Own Words (Cambridge, 2008), original ed.: Al-Qaida dans le texte, (Paris, 2005). ———, Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam, (Cambridge, 2002). Original edition: Jihad: espansion et déclin de l’islamisme, (Paris, 2000). Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam, (Chicago, 1988). Abu al-‘Ala Mawdudi, Jihad in Islam, (Lahore, 1976). ———, The Sick Nations of the Modern Age, (Lahore, 1966). Vali Reza Nasr, Mawdudi and the Making of Islamic Revivalism, (Oxford, 1996). Albert C. Niemeijer, The Khilafat Movement in India, 1919–1924, (The Hague, 1972). Rudolh Peters, Islam and Colonialism: The doctrine of Jihad in Modern History, (The Hague – Paris – New York, 1979). ———, Jihad in Classical and Modern Islam: A Reader, (Princeton, 1996). Valeria F. Piacentini, Il pensiero militare nel mondo musulmano, (Milano, 1996). Andrea Plebani (ed.), New (and old) patterns of jihadism: al-Qaʿida, the

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Islamic State and beyond, (Milano, 2014). Sayyid Qutb, Ma‘alim fi-l-Tariq, (Beirut – Cairo, 1981). Rashid Rida, Fatawa al-Imam Muhammad Rashid Rida, (Beirut, 1970). Olivier Roy, L’échec de l’Islam politique, (Paris, 1992). ———, The Failure of Political Islam, (London, 1994). Thomas Scott, ‘The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Study of World Politics’, Millennium, 24/2 (1995). Julius Wellhausen, The Religio-Political Factions in Early Islam, translated by R.C. Ostler, S.M. Walzer (Amsterdam, 1975). Ansari Yamamah, ‘The Shift of Jihād: Between Ideal and Historical Context’, Jurnal al-Tamaddun, 7/2 (2012).

15. EMERGING TRENDS IN THE BROADER JIHADI GALAXY: BETWEEN RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM ANDREA PLEBANI 1

This essay aims to delineate a series of deep changes that the jihadi galaxy has undergone at the doctrinal, operative and socio-political level since 2011. It will further outline the challenges it had to face, the different answers it tried to provide and the most important trends it took after more than ten years of absolute monopoly exerted by al-Qaʿida (AQ), a monopoly that the ascension of the self-proclaimed Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his dispute with the AQ leadership publicly questioned. In doing so, the article tries to examine the complexity of a spectrum of actors who present much more different narratives and stances than is generally assumed. Beyond their common opposition to a nation-state system reflecting the fragmentation of the Dar al-Islam and its deviation from the path set by the Prophet, these actors share the objective of reinstating a Caliphate embodying the unity and the mythicized purity of the pristine Islamic community: an Islamic State able to reunite a ‘pure’ Muslim nation for too long divided by corruption, conflicting interests and external agendas. But, apart from these basic tenets, the various jihadi groups differ significantly on the modalities required to

Dr. Andrea Plebani is a Research Fellow at the Catholic University of Milan and a Research Associate at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies (ISPI). 1

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restore the renewed umma they aspire to create, its leading role in the world, as well as on the relations it should establish with the ‘Other’ and the role armed jihad should play in this quest. In this framework, the first part of the research describes the multiple challenges al-Qaʿida had to face before and after the explosion of the Arab Spring and the elimination of its founder and leader, Osama bin Laden, presenting the deep crisis the movement was experiencing less than ten years after it rose to prominence in the jihadi galaxy. The essay then moves on to delineate the dispute that arose between AQ and the self-proclaimed ‘Islamic State’ (IS), an event that, especially in the wake of the latter’s largely unexpected success in 2014, led several analysts to sing the umpteenth requiem for al-Qaʿida. This section focuses in particular on describing AQ’s and IS’ different agendas, scopes and modus operandi, as well as their positions concerning the establishment of the Caliphate. Particular attention is dedicated to the different manhaj (methodology) they espouse, as well as to the umma they strive to ‘re-build’, and to their different stances towards the existing international order. The last part of the research examines the emergence of a series of actors who, while declaring their doctrinal proximity to the jihadi galaxy, present a series of distinctive features that could have a deep and long-lasting impact on the whole jihadi spectrum. Groups that appear to eschew the extreme and radical path IS proposes but that seem not to fit completely into al-Qaʿida’s traditional universe either. In this regard, particular attention is given to the rise of Ansar al-Shariʿa. Its focus on daʿwa activities, its support for armed jihad (albeit only in operational theatres where no compromise with existing authorities is suitable), its long-term struggle for the creation of a new Islamic State and its political activism not rooted in democratic schemes all contribute to presenting it as a new model of socio-political activism and aggregation not at odds with the jihadi doctrinal milieu.

AL -QAʿIDA AND THE 2011 MAELSTROM

Ayman al-Zawahiri’s ascension to the helm of the al-Qaʿida network took place during one of the most difficult periods the movement had experienced since its foundation. The May 2011 raid conducted by US Navy SEAL forces in Abbottabad not only deprived AQ of its most important symbol but also had

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 441 implications far exceeding the boundaries of the group. Thanks to his charisma and credentials, Osama bin Laden succeeded for over a decade to represent the quintessence of the mujahid and to become a renowned point of reference for the whole jihadi galaxy, a reality much more heterogeneous and fragmented than generally assumed. Bin Laden’s death left a vacuum that no one could have easily filled, but his elimination became even more significant in the light of the exceptional events that shook the very foundations of the Middle Eastern system. The ‘Arab Spring’ disrupted countries considered amongst the most stable in the region and generated a vast series of spillover effects that affected not only their immediate neighbors, but also the whole area in ways that even now, more than six years after the uprisings began, it is still too early to assess. Its immediate aftermath also seemed to represent a huge blow for what had been considered one of the main pillars of the al-Qaʿida doctrine: the assumption that change in the Muslim world can be attained only through an armed jihad that could not have been substituted for by political activism or peaceful manifestations. The very fact that the same Arab dictators that several mujahidin tried in vain to topple 2 were defeated not by a vanguard of fighter-believers but by masses of people demanding bread, dignity and justice (themes not immediately related to the implementation of a shariʾa-based order) took jihadi scholars offguard. While several reacted by expressing sincere satisfaction for the fall of regimes deemed apostate and corrupt, trying also to underline al-Qaʿida’s contributions to these exceptional results, they fully understood how critical the implications of such events could be for their cause, due also to the greater influence moderate Islamist groups obtained in the months that followed. 3 A clear example being Ayman al-Zawahiri. Before becoming one of the most vocal supporters of the primacy of the far enemy over the near one, the current amir of al-Qaʿida tried on several occasions to ‘sever the head’ of the Egyptian regime without success, as happened with the failed 1995 assassination attempt against President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa. 3 See Nelly Lahoud–Muhammad al-ʿUbaydi, ‘Jihadi Discourse in the Wake of the Arab Spring’, Combating Terrorism Center, (2013), pp. 28–29. 2

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The role Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated movements played in the aftermath of the uprisings and the influence exerted by their model of political change became so strong it forced even some of the most intransigent Salafi movements to reconsider their position towards political participation. What was considered until a few weeks earlier as inherently incompatible with a truly Islamic order and the antithesis to the tawhid 4 dogma became admissible even in environments that used to be completely at odds with concepts like majoritarian rule and democratic representation. Emblematic of this was the case of the Hizb al-Nur party, the al-Daʿwa al-Salafiyya offshoot that, despite its traditional condemnation of democracy, succeeded in finishing second after the Muslim Brotherhoodbacked Freedom and Justice Party at the first post-Mubarak elections held in Egypt. 5 This provided the umpteenth proof of the inherent diversity of a radical Islamist galaxy that, despite its universal vocation and presumed coherence, is affected by multiple (and often competing) narratives and agendas. Apart from showing the feasibility of alternative Islamist models, the successes scored by moderate Islamist movements further highlighted al-Qaʿida’s inability to accompany the pars destruens of its narrative (i.e., its armed campaign) with an equally successful pars construens, able to show the world the superiority of the paradigm it espoused. On the contrary, after ten years of heavy fighting and huge human and material losses, the group seemed no closer to the proclamation of an Islamic Caliphate than it was at the time of its foundation in Afghanistan. Even worse, whenever alQaʿida and its affiliates succeeded in gaining control of important swaths of land they failed miserably, proving unable not only to demonstrate the superiority of alleged shariʿa-based administrations but also to provide basic services to the population. Paradigmatic was the case of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI) declared in October 2006. Despite its rhetoric, ISI’s much-trumpeted government did The Islamic tenet reflecting the centrality of God, a dogma that jihadi movements sustain can be fulfilled only by implementing shariʿa norms. 5 See Mokhtar Awad, ‘The Salafi Dawa of Alexandria: The Politics of a Religious Movement’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 17 (2013), p. 5. 4

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 443 not succeed in exerting any authority over the territories it claimed to control and it was crushed by a US-backed coalition supported by several local actors (the sahwa movements) angered by the harsh measures implemented by the group, as well as by its disdain for local traditions and equilibriums. Paraphrasing Peter Bergen, if Osama Bin Laden’s death was a large nail in in the coffin of the al-Qaʿida organization, the Arab Spring was an equally large nail in the coffin of al-Qaʿida’s ideology. 6 The situation was made even more instable by the gradual, albeit evident, American disengagement from an area that for decades represented the focus of Washington’s foreign policy: a shift that was aptly epitomized by the December 2011 US troop withdrawal from Iraq. The process not only increased the volatility of an arc of crisis stretching from North Africa to CentralSouthern Asia, but, paradoxically, had a negative effect also on alQaʿida. While hailed as a symbol of the victory obtained by the mujahidin over the ‘Great Satan’, the move deprived the group of the possibility to target American forces in an operational theatre much closer and more conducive than US soil. Such proximity had allowed AQ operatives to wage for over seven years a military campaign against a distant enemy (transformed into one close at hand), with all the benefits in terms of visibility, propaganda, recruitment and training this situation brought with it. With US forces gone, the group had to find new outlets for its global armed campaign in order to maintain its importance. As aptly stated by Bruce Hoffman, Al Qaeda appears almost as the archetypal shark in the water, having to move forward constantly, albeit changing direction slightly in order to survive. Al Qaeda’s main challenge is to promote and ensure its durability as an ideology and a concept.

Peter Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda, (New York, 2011), p. 351. 6

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It can do this only by staying in the news and launching new attacks. 7

But the crisis that hit the movement in 2011 was not spurred only by exogenous factors: despite all its proclamations and propaganda, the hold exerted by al-Qaʿida central 8 over its loose network was weak as never before. With its leaders scattered and forced into hiding to escape a manhunt able to eliminate several of their most skilled and reliable cadres, AQ was described by analysts and experts alike as the shadow of its former glory days, unable to organize attacks comparable for magnitude and scale to the ones launched between 2001 and 2005 but also, and even more important, unable to maintain control over a global struggle de facto determined by the particularisms and the various agendas of its regional nodes and affiliates. 9 As demonstrated by the documents seized by US forces in his Abbottabad compound, it was exactly this inability to reign over the network he created and to avoid deviations able to stain the image of the global armed jihad that seemed to worry bin Laden the most in the last part of his existence. 10 The situation Ayman al-Zawahiri inherited in 2011 was therefore far from ideal. Internally, the group had to cope with a dysfunctional command and control chain, as well as with significant ideological and operative divides. Externally, it had to face the pressure exerted by international security agencies as well as by competing Islamist movements, whose apparent success threatened the very foundations of AQ’s discourse. But another Bruce Hoffman, ‘What Can We Learn From the Terrorists?’, Global agenda, (January 2004). 8 Bruce Hoffman, Inside Terrorism, (New York, 2006). 9 See Seth G. Jones, ‘A Persistent Threat: The Evolution of alQaʿida and Other Salafi Jihadists’, RAND, (2014) and William McCants, ‘How Zawahiri Lost al Qaeda. Global Jihad Turns on Itself’, Foreign Affairs, (November 19, 2013). 10 N. Lahoud, S. Caudill, L. Collins, G. Koehler-Derrick, D. Rassler, M. al-ʿUbaydi, ‘Letters From Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?’, Combating Terrorism Center, (May 3, 2012), p. 4. 7

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 445 factor contributed to complicating even further the task of the Egyptian leader: while possessing significant jihadi experience and theological credentials, al-Zawahiri lacked the charisma that allowed his predecessor to remain for decades at the forefront of the jihadi galaxy. An element far from being irrelevant in the new jihadi landscape that, while continuing to be dominated by an ‘honor code’ based on prestige and personal bonds, was extremely dependent on its capacity to exploit the opportunities provided by the information age. And al-Zawahiri, with all his knowledge and experience, could not match the aura of myth that shrouded bin Laden or his ability to inspire. These problems emerged dramatically in all their depth in the months that followed Osama bin Laden’s elimination, especially in relation to the opportunities and the perils unleashed by the Arab Spring. The uprisings that swept North Africa, the Levant and even part of the Persian Gulf caught the al-Qaʿida leadership completely off-guard, obliging it to respond to their multiple effects without a clear, coherent and coordinated approach. In his ‘Missive of hope and joy to our people of Egypt’, al-Zawahiri showed all the gaps of the AQ approach. While greeting the 2011 uprisings as the dawn of a new era, the Egyptian scholar warned the liberated peoples that their struggle was not over and that the enemy would not have renounced re-extending its control over the areas it administered for decades, thanks to the support of apostate leaders. To prevent this scenario, he invited the population neither to give heed to false promises nor to succumb to the temptation of the ballot box, considered not only antithetical to the Islamic creed but also a tool used by the enemies of the umma to hasten the return of the status quo ante. But when it came to define how to pass from a mere confrontational stance to a constructive one, al-Zawahiri failed to provide a pragmatic response, limiting himself to suggesting the formation of an Islamic government based on the principle of consultation. A government that would have been charged with the implementation of shariʿa rules and would have avoided meddling with international forums and institutions dominated by ‘crusaders

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and Jews’. 11 Practical indications, such as the criteria required for election, the powers bestowed on the council, as well as the procedures required to create it, were not addressed at all. This was a major flaw in the AQ scheme, especially due to the huge interest institutional systems and political dynamics exerted over populations who had just freed themselves from authoritarian regimes that for decades had maintained their absolute control over the socio-political space. But it was in relation to the management of al-Qaʿida’s internal relations that some of the main deficiencies of alZawahiri’s tenure emerged in all their depth. One of the most controversial decisions taken by the new administration regarded al-Shabaab’s 2012 admission to the al-Qaʿida network, a move opposed not only by several high-level members but even by Osama bin Laden, who feared the Somali leadership’s weak control over the movement, its strained relations with other local actors and its extreme doctrinal positions. The decision did not pay off and coincided with a downward spiral that brought al-Shabaab to lose most of the areas it once controlled, to wage a wave of attacks that killed thousands of fellow Muslims and to become embroiled in a series of endless internal feuds and vendettas. 12 Even more significant was the blow inflicted to the image of al-Qaʿida by the demise of the Emirates declared in northern Mali at the end of 2012. While their foundation was hailed as a great success and considered by their opponents a major threat to the whole of the Sahel, the jihadi leadership failed to capitalize on the early successes scored against Bamako’s troops and local competing militias. The imposition of draconian religious norms, the inability to provide basic services to the population and the systematic violation of local traditions and equilibriums reached levels so high that even the AQ leadership felt compelled to issue a formal rebuke of the positions taken by the mujahidin. A few months later, the jihadi troops that occupied northern Mali literally Nelly Lahoud al-ʿUbaydi, ‘Jihadi Discourse in the Wake of the Arab Spring’, p. 53. 12 Christopher Anzalone, ‘The Rise and Decline of al-Shabab in Somalia’, Turkish Review, 4/4 (2014). 11

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 447 evaporated in front of the French-led military mission dispatched to quell the uprising, demonstrating al-Qaʿida’s inability to confront the ‘far enemy’ (in this case embodied by French troops), an accusation that has haunted AQ’s Maghreb node since its foundation. 13 While significant, the impact of the Somali and Malian debacles has been null compared to the consequences of the dispute that put al-Qaʿida at loggerheads with its former regional node in Iraq. A dispute that shook the very foundations of AQ’s primacy over the jihadi galaxy and that threatened a modus operandi uncontested for over 14 years.

FROM ABU MUSʿAB AL-ZARQAWI TO ABU BAKR ALBAGHDADI: THE ENEMY WITHIN

The roots of the dispute between the self-proclaimed Islamic State and al-Qaʿida can be traced back to the post-2003 Iraqi scenario, which witnessed the ascendance of the Abu Musʿab al-Zarqawi-led Jamaʿat al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad. Despite the limited resources at his disposal, the Jordanian leader soon emerged as one of the most influential players in the heterogeneous insurgency opposing the US-backed ‘new Iraq’, laying the foundations for a strategic partnership with al-Qaʿida that culminated in his 2004 pledge of alliance to Osama bin Laden and in the foundation of Tanzim Qaʿidat al-Jihad fi Bilad al-Rafidayn (known to the wider public as alQaʿida in Iraq, or AQI). The move was grounded more on a series of converging interests than on shared doctrinal and operative bases, and this ‘dissonance’ provoked a series of frictions that would seal the fate of the union. Far from focusing on targets generally associated with al-Qaʿida’s ‘traditional’ modus operandi (US and international troops stationed in Iraq, as well as members of the new Iraqi security forces), at least since 2005 al-Zarqawi preferred unleashing a wave of terror and destruction against Shi‘a civilian and religious targets, reaching levels of violence never seen before. The purpose was simple and essential: sparking the flames Jean Pierre Filiu, ‘The Fractured Jihadi Movement in the Sahara’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 16 (2014). 13

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of civil war to make the Iraqi reconciliation process derail and to present al-Qaʿida in Iraq as the only force able and willing to protect the Iraqi Sunni community from its internal and external enemies. 14 The bet seemed to pay off, allowing the group to consolidate its position at the helm of the Arab Sunni-backed insurgency, as well as to increase its appeal among the most extreme wings of the jihadi galaxy. Despite the success obtained at the tactical and the propaganda levels, the response given by mainstream jihadi actors was far from enthusiastic. The strategic shift al-Zarqawi imposed on the Iraqi jihad was built on a series of doctrinal positions that, while not completely alien to the Salafi-jihadi galaxy, deviated from its core narrative, exposing it to internal strife and external accusations. Several prominent scholars associated with the jihadi galaxy voiced their concern and asked the Jordanian leader to reconsider his decision. Among them was Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, a JordanianPalestinian preacher considered al-Zarqawi’s mentor. 15 Despite their long relationship, al-Maqdisi openly attacked al-Zarqawi’s modus operandi both at the doctrinal and at the strategic level. In a letter and in a series of interviews released in 2004–2005, the preacher chastised AQI’s actions, accusing the group of lacking both the religious and the operative preparation required to wage a successful jihad. He also harshly condemned some of the means used by the mujahidin, especially the targeting of illegitimate objectives (‘Shi‘a mosques, churches, buses and non-combatants’) and the use of suicide bombings, considered legitimate only as ultima ratio. 16 Actions that, according to the preacher, risked staining the image of jihad in the eyes of the world, creating a dangerous parallel with the tragic 1990s Algerian scenario. Brian Fishman, ‘After Zarqawi: The Dilemmas and Future of Al Qaeda in Iraq’, The Washington Quarterly, 29/4 (Autumn 2006). 15 Steven Brooke, ‘The Preacher and the Jihadi’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 3 (2006). 16 Joas Wagemakers, ‘Reclaiming scholarly authority: Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi’s critique of jihadi practices’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 35 (2011), pp. 525–526. 14

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 449 Even Ayman al-Zawahiri invited al-Zarqawi to modify his tactics in a letter sent on July 9, 2005, the first of a series of warnings ignored by AQI’s cadre and leadership. People of discernment and knowledge among Muslims know the extent of danger to Islam of the […] Shiism […][But] the majority of Muslims don’t comprehend this [and] this matter won’t be acceptable to the Muslim populace however much you have tried to explain it, and aversion to this will continue. 17

Despite this opposition, al-Zarqawi soon became one of the mostrevered figures of the jihadi galaxy and the symbol of its resistance to US occupation. The missile strike that killed him in 2006 was a terrible blow for AQI, marking the beginning of a downward spiral that would bring it to the edge of collapse. In a few months, the group passed from spearheading the insurgency battling the international coalition and the Iraqi security forces to defending itself from its former Arab-Sunni allies, alienated by AQI’s attempt to exert its control over central-western Iraq, by its inability to protect their brethren in Baghdad, as well as by the draconian measures it imposed in the areas under its formal control. 18 Neither the formation of a new umbrella-group (the Mujahidin Shura council) nor its absorption into the Islamic State in Iraq, proclaimed in 2006, succeeded in averting the crisis. Despite its claims over most of Iraq’s central-western governorates and the creation of a cabinet tasked with administrating the lands under its formal authority, the group had to abandon its strongholds in central-western Iraq and to relocate to Nineveh governorate, where it could count on limited local support as well as on the proximity A. Moghadam, B. Fishman, Fault lines in global jihad: organizational, strategic, and ideological fissures, (London, 2011). 18 Coalition forces realized the potential of these rifts and seized the opportunity to defeat the insurgency from inside by supporting the formation of sahwa councils (largely made up of former insurgents) fighting al-Qaʿida forces. See Michael M. Eisenstadt, ‘Tribal Engagement: Lessons Learned’, Military Review, (September–October 2007). 17

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of the Syrian border. 19 A shadow of its former ‘glory’, the movement was considered to be in its death throes. It was only with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s IS ascendance that ISI returned to playing a prominent role in Iraq and in the region. Exploiting the dramatic ethno-sectarian polarization that the Iraqi socio-political system witnessed during Nuri al-Maliki’s last term, the withdrawal of US troops in December 2011 and the growing regional instability, the new amir succeeded in gradually recovering the group’s past prominence. 20 But it was al-Baghdadi’s ‘Syrian bid’ that impacted ISI’s definitive comeback the most. His backing of Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN) proved fundamental to transforming the organization into the most important insurgent group in Syria, allowing the Iraqi leader to recover part of the legitimacy ISI lost in the internecine struggle fought with sahwa forces, to attract new volunteers and funding, as well as to increase his influence over growing swaths of territory. 21 The strength acquired by alBaghdadi’s forces on both sides of the Syrian-Iraqi border spurred him to raise the stakes of his bid: on April 9, 2013 he publicly declared JAN’s subservience to his leadership and the merging of the two groups into the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). The move sparked a significant crisis in JAN ranks: while owing much to ISI support, the group always presented itself as part of the anti-Assad insurgency, carefully avoiding being directly associated with ISI or al-Qaʿida’s galaxy. In a public statement issued a few days later, JAN’s amir, Abu Muhammad al-Julani, reaffirmed the autonomy of the group and his loyalty to Ayman alZawahiri, opposing the merger and involving al-Qaʿida’s leadership in the dispute. Al-Zawahiri’s direct intervention and mediation did not prevent the escalation of the crisis. After months of prolonged Andrea Plebani, ‘Ninawa Province: Al-Qaida’s Remaining Stronghold’, Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, (January 2010). 20 See M. Knights, ‘Back with a Vengeance: al-Qaeda in Iraq Rebounds’, IHS Defense, Security & Risk Consulting, (February 24, 2012). 21 See Andrea Plebani, ‘The Unfolding Legacy of al-Qa’ida in Iraq’, in New (and Old) Patterns of Jihadism: al-Qa’ida, the Islamic State and Beyond, Ed. Andrea Plebani, (Milan, 2014). 19

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 451 stalemate and brazen communiqués, in February 2014 the Egyptian leader publicly condemned ISIS, distancing al-Qaʿida from the actions carried out by the movement and de facto marking the beginning of open competition for leadership of the jihadi galaxy.

THE FISSURE EXPOSED

While the rupture was formally determined by different strategic visions in Syria and Iraq, the fissure that divides al-Qaʿida and the purported Islamic State reflects much deeper discrepancies on multiple levels. The first and most evident is related to the goal both declare they pursue: the construction of a Caliphate able to restore the unity of the umma and to foster its adherence to (what they consider) the purest tenets of the Islamic message. Despite this common objective, the two actors disagree both on the modalities (manhaj) required to achieve their shared goal and on the contours the Islamic State should present. While al-Qaʿida’s doctrine is clearly built on the need to awaken the umma from its torpor and to free it from the shackles that immobilized it for centuries, its key ideologues have always stressed the long temporal frame AQ’s struggle requires. The vanguard of believers Abdullah ʿAzzam invoked 22 and al-Qaʿida tried to embody was set to act as a catalyst for a broad-sweeping change that would have brought its fruits only if its armed struggle were sustained by prolonged daʿwa activities aimed at increasing the awareness of the Islamic community and at laying the foundations for its re-Islamization. Al-Zawahiri said: ‘Every principle needs a vanguard to carry it forward and [to] put up with heavy tasks and enormous sacrifices. There is no ideology, neither earthly nor heavenly, that does not require […] a vanguard that gives everything it possesses in order to achieve victory. […] It carries the flag all along the sheer, endless and difficult path until it reaches its destination in the reality of life, since Allah has destined that it should make it and manifest itself. This vanguard constitutes the strong foundation (al-qaeda al-sulbah) for the expected society.’ Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al Qaeda, (New York, 2002), pp. 4–5. 22

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If we are in agreement that the victory of Islam and the establishment of a caliphate in the manner of the Prophet will not be achieved except through jihad […], then this goal will not be accomplished by the mujahed movement while it is cut off from public support, even if the Jihadist movement pursues the method of sudden overthrow. […] In the absence of this popular support, the Islamic mujahed movement would be crushed in the shadows, far from the masses who are distracted or fearful […]. This is precisely what the secular, apostate forces that are controlling our countries are striving for. These forces don’t desire to wipe out the mujahed Islamic movement; rather they are stealthily striving to separate it from the misguided or frightened Muslim masses. Therefore, our planning must strive to involve the Muslim masses in the battle, and to bring the mujahed movement to the masses and not conduct the struggle far from them. 23

In this framework, al-Qaʿida considers the creation of emirates or Islamic states not as an objective per se, but as part of a broader strategy requiring precise conditions to be met, 24 a stance that has clear strategic implications, as the refusal given by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to ‘Islamic States’ shortcuts’ demonstrated. 25 ‘Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’, Combating Terrorism Center, (2005): https://www.ctc.usma.edu/v2/wp-content/ uploads/2013/10/Zawahiris-Letter-to-Zarqawi-Translation.pdf 24 Haim Malka, ‘Jihadi-Salafi Rebellion and the Crisis of Authority’, in Religious Radicalism after the Arab Uprising, Ed. Jon Altermann, (Lanham, 2015), p. 17. 25 The letters seized by US forces at Abbottabad showed how Osama bin Laden adamantly opposed the creation of Islamic States in Yemen and Somalia. Equally brazen has been the refusal of the Islamic State declared in Iraq and Syria by al-Zawahiri in a statement issued in 2014: ‘we do not hasten to declare emirates and states… that we impose on people, then declare whoever disapproves of such entities to be a rebel [against whom it is lawful to fight]’ M. al-ʿUbaydi, N. Lahoud, D. Milton, B. Price, ‘The Group That Calls Itself a State: Understanding the 23

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 453 Such a long-term strategy is completely at odds with the ‘fasttrack approach’ al-Baghdadi and his supporters espouse. In their view, the creation of a state dominated by shariʿa norms equates to a beacon of light able to awaken the whole umma, a step embodying the very wave of change al-Qaʿida’s cadres aimed at sparking. According to this vision, the Caliphate does not have to be considered the final stage of a long-term struggle, but one of its constituent parts; not a mere objective that will mark the beginning of a new era, but a medium playing a fundamental part in the purification of Islamic society and the creation of a new world order. Such a vision implies a completely different perception of the role the two movements aim to play. While Osama bin Laden had always aimed at transforming al-Qaʿida into a focal point for the jihadi community recurring, at least at a formal level, to a primus inter pares approach, the Islamic State has claimed since its foundation in June 2014 to represent the only legitimate authority. ‘We clarify to the Muslims that with this declaration of khilafa, it is incumbent upon all Muslims to pledge allegiance to the khalifa Ibrahim and support him (may Allah preserve him). The legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organizations becomes null by the expansion of the khilafa’s authority and arrival of its troops to their areas’. 26 This declaration allows us to also take into consideration AQ’s and IS’ different stances towards the existing international system. While both consider Dar al-Islam’s division into nation states a deviation from the model the Prophet announced, they present significant differences over the way the mujahidin should deal with the international system and its components. Abu Bakr alBaghdadi’s 2014 decision to remove any geographical reference from the name of the state he claims to preside over (changing it Evolution and Challenges of the Islamic State’, Combating Terrorism Center, (December 2014), p. 15. 26 ‘ISIS Spokesman Declares Caliphate, Rebrands Group as “Islamic State”’, SITE, (29 June 2014): https://news.siteintelgroup.com/JihadistNews/isis-spokesman-declares-caliphate-rebrands-group-as-islamicstate.html

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from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant to Islamic State tout court) implies an ecumenical aspiration based on a multi-pronged strategy culminating in an IS-dominated world order freed of artificial ethnic and linguistic boundaries and empty nationalisms. The stated objective is the creation of a shariʿa-based state tasked with the redefinition and reconstruction of a universal Islamic nation; a re-forged umma reflecting the mythicized purity of the pristine Islamic community that gathered around the Prophet and his companions. The multiple references the group makes to the ‘historical’ Medina, to the victories scored by the Muhammadan troops at the dawn of the Islamic era and to the seminal moments of the Rashidun (rightly guided) Caliphs all serve this purpose, contributing to strengthen a narrative fluctuating between a mythicized past and the promises of a new golden age. O Muslims everywhere, […] raise your head high, for today – by Allah’s grace – you have a state and khilafah […]. It is a state where the Arab and non-Arab, the white man and black man, the easterner and westerner are all brothers. It is a khilafah that gathered the Caucasian, Indian, Chinese, Shāmī, Iraqi, Yemeni, Egyptian, Maghribī (North African), American, French, German, and Australian. Allah brought their hearts together, and thus, they became brothers by His grace, loving each other for the sake of Allah, standing in a single trench, defending and guarding each other, and sacrificing themselves for one another. Their blood mixed and became one, under a single flag and goal. […] Therefore, rush O Muslims to your state. Yes, it is your state. Rush, because Syria is not for the Syrians, and Iraq is not for the Iraqis. The earth is Allah’s. 27

Such a project, inherently ecumenical in its outlook, leaves no room for compromises between the purported Islamic State and other (Muslim and non-Muslim) nation states, whose very existence represents the proof of the legacy of subjugation and decadence Al-Hayat Media Center, ‘A Message to the Mujahidin and the Muslim Ummah in the Month of Ramadan’, (July 1, 2014), p. 2: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/documents/baghdadi-caliph.pdf 27

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 455 that haunts the Islamic community. 28 It is in this context that the much-trumpeted demolition of the borders separating Iraq from Syria has been presented by IS not only as the manifestation of its power but as the dawn of a new era dominated by a Caliphate built over the same territories the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement allotted to various Western powers, declaring in their publication Dabiq: It was only a matter of time before the oppressive tawaghit of the Muslim world would begin to fall one-by-one to the swords of the mujahidin, who would raise the banner of tawhid, restore the hukm of Allah, direct the masses back to the prophetic manhaj of jihad and away from the corruption of democracy and nationalism, and unite them under one imam. […] the lions succeeded in taking control of the border region between Wilayat Al-Barakah in Sham, and Wilayat Ninawa in Iraq, and in demolishing the barriers set up to enforce the crusader partitions of the past century. The mujahidin had taken a major step in casting off the shackles of the kafir nations and proving that no kafir was strong enough to separate the Muslims from one another. 29

Al-Qaʿida’s long term objectives do not differ significantly from the ones expressed by IS but, once again, the two actors diverge on the means to be adopted, in primis concerning the priority system regulating the struggle against the near and the far enemy. While alQaʿida made the fight against the United States and its allies its first and foremost task, IS de facto reversed this dogma, presenting its battles in Iraq and Syria as the beginning of an apocalyptic struggle destined to involve the whole world and to anticipate the end of Particularly interesting in this regard is one passage of Dabiq’s first volume, describing the world as divided ‘between the camp of the kufr and hypocrisy and the camp of the Muslims and the mujahidin and the camp of the Jews, crusaders, their allies and with the them the rest of the nations and religions of kufr, all being led by America and Russia, and being mobilized by the Jews’. ‘The Return of the Khilafah’, Dabiq, alHayat Media Center, 1 (2014). 29 ‘Smashing the Borders of the Tawaghit’, Islamic State Report, alHayat Media Center, 4 (2014), pp. 1–3. 28

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time, declaring, “The spark has been lit here in Iraq, and its heat will continue to intensify, by Allah’s permission, until it burns the crusader armies in Dabiq”. 30 Furthermore, while IS’ strategic and doctrinal tenets seem tailored to foster an all-out war against its (near and far) enemies, al-Qaʿida adopted a much more cautious approach espoused at the end of 2013 by Ayman al-Zawahiri in his seminal document General Guidelines for Jihad: As far as targeting the proxies of America is concerned, […] the basic principle is to avoid entering into any conflict with them, except in the countries where confronting them becomes inevitable […]. If we are forced to fight, then we must make it clear that our struggle against them is a part of our resistance against the Crusader onslaught against Muslims. Further, wherever we are afforded the possibility to pacify the conflict with the local rulers so as to avail of the opportunity for propagation, expressing our viewpoint, inciting the believers, recruiting, fund raising and gaining supporters, we must make the most of this opportunity; for our struggle is a long one, and Jihad is in need of safe bases and consistent support in terms of men, finances, and expertise. 31

Moreover, while both groups share an extremely radical position that adopts a ‘with us or against us’ approach, their attitude towards whoever does not share their cause seems to present peculiar differences. In this regard, the wave of terror, humiliation and violence IS unleashes over the ‘Other’ is aimed not only at terrifying its opponents and at instilling resolve in its cadres, but also at ‘purifying’ the constituency of the purported Islamic State of all the elements considered incompatible with the renewed society. A new Islamic nation to be built over the ashes of the societies corrupted by concepts, practices and deviations that stained the universal message conveyed by the Prophet, depriving the umma of its leading role for the whole of mankind. It is in this framework ‘The Return of the Khilafah’. Ayman al-Zawahiri, ‘General Guidelines for Jihad’, As-Sahab Media, (2013), pp. 1–4. 30 31

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 457 that IS’ overexploitation of the takfir practice has to be considered, since it provides the legal basis for indiscriminate massacres that have nothing to do with the mainstream Islamic message. Polytheists, members of the Ahl al-Kitab, Muslims adhering to heterodox sects and even Sunnis not accepting the ‘new order’ are purged not only because they refuse to convert, pay the jiziya or repent, but because they could infect the new society and the homo novus it aims at creating. This sentiment is again made clear in IS’ publication Dabiq: Living amongst the sinful kills the heart, never mind living amongst the kuffār! Their kufr initially leaves dashes and traces upon the heart that over time become engravings and carvings that are nearly impossible to remove. They can destroy the person’s fitrah to a point of no return, so that his heart’s doubts and desires entrap him fully. 32

Hangings, beheadings, crucifixions and stonings are documented and later disseminated to serve the strategy ‘hit one to educate one hundred’: a brutal exhibition of violence aimed at dehumanizing the ‘Other’, transforming it into an enemy to be eradicated in order to preserve the integrity of the renewed society. A strategy that does not differentiate between enemy soldiers shot or set ablaze, Yazidi women enslaved, homosexuals thrown off roofs or children hanged because caught watching a football game of the Iraqi national team. On the other hand, while it would be naïve to consider al-Qaʿida more moderate than IS, the group seems to have adopted a far more nuanced approach towards the ‘Other’ than its counterpart, marking a significant doctrinal and strategic shift with respect to its earlier positions. Once again, al-Zawahiri’s General Guidelines for Jihad represents a unique point of reference for the al-Qa’ida network. In the document, the Egyptian leader sets forth a series of norms related to how AQ associates should interact with groups and communities not part of the Ahl al-Sunna, asking his followers to avoid fighting other Islamic creeds 33, except ‘A Call to Hijra’, Dabiq, al-Hayat Media Center, 3 (2014), p. 32. Al-Zawahiri labels them ‘deviant’, including in this category ‘Rawafidh, Ismailis, Qadianis and Sufis’. 32 33

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for self-defence 34 and, even in that case, ‘the response must be restricted to those parties […] directly engaged in the fight’. 35 Nonhostile members of these groups inhabiting areas under AQ control should be invited to adhere to the ‘true’ Islamic faith but their lives and their properties should not be harmed. Quite unexpected also is al-Zawahiri’s position towards ‘Christian, Sikh and Hindu communities living in Muslim lands’, who should be punished in case they violate Islamic law or plot to harm the mujahidin, but who should be made aware that ‘we [do] not seek to initiate a fight against them, since we are engaged in fighting the head of disbelief (America); and that we are keen to live with them in a peaceful manner after an Islamic state is established in the near future, Allah willing’. 36 Although al-Qaʿida’s affiliated forces did not hesitate to conduct assaults on a sectarian basis in multiple operational theatres, al-Zawahiri’s invitation to self-restraint seems intended to mark a strategic shift aimed at strengthening his control over the group and at avoiding the risks connected with an over-exploitation of violence. A plea for moderation that, while appearing at odds with the radical stance the group embodies, aims at distinguishing its ‘legitimate’ struggle from the one conducted by Daesh 37 forces, protecting it from the mounting criticism of the whole jihadi galaxy after the massacres perpetrated in the region. Massacres that several high-level jihadi scholars did not hesitate to consider anything other than brutal acts staining the image of jihad. It is in this framework that al-Zawahiri’s appeals to avoid attacks against unarmed targets, especially women and children, as well as against objectives with no clear operative value, such as ‘mosques, markets and gatherings […] where they [the enemy] mixes with Muslims or with those who do not fight us’, 38 should be read. Such a stance seems to reflect the adoption of a modus operandi Self-defence is extended not only to al-Qaʿida operatives but to local Sunni communities too. 35 Ayman al-Zawahiri, General Guidelines for Jihad, p. 4. 36 Ibid., p. 5. 37 A term used to identify the Islamic State deriving from the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. 38 A. Al-Zawahiri, General Guidelines for Jihad, p. 3. 34

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 459 much more attuned to popular sentiment and the legitimate means of armed jihad than is generally assumed. While not alien to the group’s doctrine, 39 this position has never been espoused as clearly as in the 2013 Guidelines, reflecting al-Qaʿida’s adoption of a twopronged strategic posture coupling its pars destruens (the armed struggle) with a pars construens focused on daʿwa efforts aimed at ‘spreading awareness amongst the general public so as to mobilize it’. 40 The importance of the latter being certified not only by the prominent position al-Zawahiri gave ‘propagandising’ activities in his Guidelines, but also by a shift in AQ modus operandi that manifested itself especially in Syria. Despite its tactical convergence with al-Baghdadi, since its inception Jabhat al-Nusra 41 distinguished itself by adopting a strategic stance coupling the armed struggle against Bashar al-Assad forces with a series of efforts aimed at winning the ‘hearts and minds’ of the local population. It is in this framework that the following policies are embedded: the provision of food and basic services to communities neglected both by the central government and by its opponents, the respect paid to local tribal structures, the coordination with other insurgent groups, as well as the re-establishment of a rule of law system that, while based on shariʿa courts espousing radical Islamic tenets, proved its efficacy in countering the instability affecting huge areas of the country since 2011. 42 Measures that contributed to strengthen Both bin Laden and al-Zawahiri stressed in their declarations and writings the necessity to support al-Qaʿida’s struggle with initiatives aimed at fostering popular support. However, the 2013 Guidelines seem to underline a renewed interest in daʿwa activities, considering them as important as armed jihad. 40 A. Al-Zawahiri, General Guidelines for Jihad, p. 3. 41 The group, since 2012 considered the Syrian al-Qaʿida node, officially severed its ties with AQ in July 2016, adopting the name Jabhat Fateh al-Sham. The move was considered by several analysts more a cosmetical change than a real shift. 42 For more information on the services the movement provides to the population see Jennifer Caffarella, ‘Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria: an Islamic Emirate for al-Qaeda’, Middle East Security Report, 25, Institute for the Study of War, (December 2014), pp. 14–15. 39

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JAN’s bonds with the territory it operated in, as demonstrated by the widespread opposition that followed the 2012 US designation of the group as a terrorist organization. Far from representing a mere public relations campaign aimed at soothing opposition towards al-Qaʿida’s radical doctrine, these efforts were all part of a broader daʿwa campaign bearing striking similarities with Hamas or Hezbollah-like initiatives. And, as such, aimed not only at creating a conducive environment for the group’s armed campaign, but at making lasting inroads in a society called upon to play an active role in a struggle not limited solely to the battlefield. Once again, the objective is the creation of a new Islamic nation, albeit in a more gradual way compared to the IS model. But it would be wrong to consider al-Qaʿida’s alleged new stance an ‘exclusive trademark’ of the movement founded by Osama bin Laden. It is a position with deep historical roots dating back at least to the writings of Maulana Abu al-Ala al-Mawdudi 43 and his epigones, but even more recently backed by a series of scholars often associated with Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l Jihad. And it has been mainly through this platform formed with the intent of preserving the ‘purity’ of the jihadi struggle that the ‘armed jihad plus daʿwa’ approach has been advocated by a wide array of military and socio-political actors not necessarily affiliated with al-Qaʿida. Prominent among them have been the different offshoots of Ansar al-Shariʿa (AS) in Yemen, Libya and Tunisia that, despite all their significant differences, appear to have inaugurated a new phase for the Salafi-jihadi galaxy: a phase marked by the attempt to reinstate Islam at the very centre of the society and of its institutions, through the adoption of socio-political means partly marginalized during the al-Qaʿida-dominated era.

A NEW STAGE OF SALAFI-JIHADISM?

Differently from al-Qaʿida or the self-proclaimed Islamic State, the various Ansar al-Shariʿa nodes neither respond to a unified See in this volume Riccardo Redaelli, ‘The Broken Mirror: How the Contemporary Jihadist Narrative Is Re-shaping the Classical Doctrine of Jihād’. 43

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 461 command and control center nor have deep operative linkages. Despite this lack of coordination, the branches operating in Yemen, Libya and Tunisia share a common doctrinal matrix. This common milieu, which emerged well before the al-Zawahiri’s doctrinal and strategic shift described above, is based on a binary concept that unites armed jihad and daʿwa. Critical for the success of this approach was the maelstrom provoked by the Arab Spring that, while shaking the basic tenets that dominated the jihadi galaxy in the past decades, proved to be a window of opportunity to reconsider its modus operandi without renouncing its objectives or reneging on previous actions. In doing so, while not downplaying the importance of the struggle al-Qaʿida waged, Ansar al-Shariʿa’s evident intent is to go beyond the model the group has represented, focusing on the need to expand its areas of action beyond AQ’s traditional hostility towards politics. As aptly described by Haim Malka and William Lawrence, such a model ‘favors a combination of aggressive grassroots community activism, direct action, and occasional violence’ that aims to ‘marry the messaging of scriptural Salafists with the political Salafists’ desire to govern, all with while retaining the rhetoric of the more violent jihadi-Salafism of al Qaeda’. 44 The nuanced approach mustered by Ansar al-Shariʿa aims at exploiting all the opportunities offered by the new Middle Eastern scenario, focusing more on daʿwa or on armed jihad according to the different contexts the group operates in but without discarding either of them. In this regard, while the opposition towards AS branches in Yemen and in Libya obliged the groups to dedicate most of their efforts to the armed struggle, neither reneged on reaching out to local communities through preaching and social activism. It is by no mere chance then, but thanks to the attention the group dedicated to society, that the Yemeni AS branch, despite its de facto affiliation with al-Qaʿida in the Arabian Peninsula, succeeded in obtaining significant local backing. A detail demonstrated by the respect (and the courtship) the group paid to local religious and tribal leaders, as well as by the provision of a Haim Malka, William Lawrence, ‘Jihadi-Salafism’s Generation’, CSIS, Analysis paper, (October 2013), p. 3. 44

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wide array of services to populations much neglected by the central government. 45 A similar stance has been taken by the Libyan node that, despite being mainly known for its alleged involvement in the attacks that caused the death of US Ambassador Stevens and for its military capabilities, dedicated significant efforts to social outreach, establishing and protecting hospital facilities, collecting trash and providing basic services to people in need, especially in Benghazi and in its suburbs. 46 Nevertheless, it is in Tunisia that the movement seems to have expressed all its potential in the daʿwa sphere. The openness of the post-Ben Ali era provided local Salafi-jihadi actors with an ideal environment in which to operate. Freed from jail, the leaders of what would have become Ansar al-Shariʿa in Tunisia (AST) set up a loose network of like-minded actors keen on reforming society from within through preaching, social activism and political mobilization. 47 Such efforts should not be considered necessarily peaceful or restricted to Salafi constituencies only. While daʿwa activities tended to focus on religious preaching and on the provision of a wide range of services (amongst them, the distribution of food, medicines and clothing, as well as education and medical care), they were also coupled with hisba practices 48 targeting prostitutes, brothels and alcohol vendors, and also artists,

Such activities included not only the provision of basic utilities like clean water and food, but also the delivery of gas, electricity and phone connections, as well as efforts dedicated to improving basic healthcare, education and local security through dedicated sharia courts and ‘police’ units. Robin Simcox, ‘Ansar al-Sharia and Governance in Southern Yemen’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, (2012). 46 See Aaron Zelin, ‘Maqdisi’s Disciples in Libya and Tunisia’, Foreign Policy, (November 14, 2012) and ‘Jihadism’s Foothold in Libya’, Policy Watch, (September 12, 2012). 47 Malka, Lawrence, ‘Jihadi-Salafism’s Next Generation’. 48 The term refers to the practice of commanding right and forbidding wrong in order to enforce shariʿa law. 45

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 463 intellectuals, journalists, women accused of transgressing Islamic norms and imams considered too friendly to the regime. 49 Thanks to these initiatives, AST succeeded in making significant in-roads in the Tunisian social fabric, especially amongst its poorest strata in the suburbs of the major cities and in the interior, presenting itself as the protector of the neglected and as the only actor interested in their plight. In doing so, the movement explicitly referred to several prominent Salafi-preachers (like the previously mentioned Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi or al-Khatib alIdrissi), some of whom publicly praised its activities and even, as in the case of Abu al-Mundhir al-Shinqiti, pointed to the group as the model the Islamic community should follow. This was a stance reiterated by the Mauritanian preacher in a 2012 article entitled ‘We are Ansar al-Shariʿa’ that invited the whole Salafi-jihadi galaxy to adopt a single name and to unite under the AS banner to seize the opportunities provided by the Arab Spring and to counter deviant ideas (a clear reference to Islamist parties that decided to enter the political realm, accepting the rules of the democratic game) and corrupt leaders. 50 But it would be erroneous to consider this focus on daʿwa activities as an implicit refutation of armed jihad. The decision to rely on less confrontational means was justified by the particular conduciveness of the post-2011 Tunisian environment and not by a condemnation of armed struggle per se. It is in this framework that the 2013 declarations issued by Abu Ayyad, AST founder and recognized leader, must be seen. According to his vision, it was the special features of post Ben Ali’s Tunisia that made it part of Dar al-Daʿwa (land of daʿwa) and not of Dar al-Jihad (land of armed jihad). And it was precisely because of these conditions that Abu See Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, ‘Ansar al-Sharia Tunisia’s Long Game: Dawa, Hisba, and Jihad’, ICCT Research Paper, (2013) and ‘Raising the Stakes: Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia’s Shift to Jihad’, ICCT Research Paper, (2014). See also Aaron Zelin, ‘Meeting Tunisia’s Ansar al-Sharia’, Foreign Policy, (2013). 50 Joas Wagemakers, ‘Il Ritorno del Jihad Dopo la Primavera’, Oasis, 19, (June 2014); Aaron Zelin, ‘Know Your Ansar al-Sharia’, Foreign Policy, (2012). 49

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Ayyad publicly invited Tunisians to keep focusing on the renovation of their country instead of moving to active theatres of armed jihad. 51 A declaration that, despite its media coverage and its potential doctrinal and strategic implications, was dismissed by intelligence reports, underlining the significant linkages uniting AST to the Tunisian contingents of mujahidin fighting in Libya and Syria. This ‘dual nature’ based on daʿwa activities at home and on more militant forms of jihadism abroad allowed AST to maintain strong links with the international jihadi community and, at the same time, to embed itself in the Tunisian social fabric through ‘non-istitutionalised’ forms of political activism. 52 This modus operandi permitted it to engage in ‘street politics’ without participating in the democratic institutions it condemns as unIslamic, as well as to step up pressure against the other Islamist groups that decided to join such institutions. 53 In so doing, the movement aimed at transforming the nature of the nation-state from within, employing an innovative approach that, while sharing significant features with the models espoused by al-Qaʿida and the self-proclaimed Islamic State, departs significantly from their positions. A position that, while weakened by the crackdown ordered by Tunisian authorities over AST since August 2013, has not erased the attractiveness of the model it embodied.

CONCLUSION

Beneath the surface of a united and coherent movement, the jihadi galaxy presents a high degree of differentiation that re-emerged in all its depth especially after 2011. Once al-Qaʿida began to lose the supremacy it acquired under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, See Aaron Zelin, ‘Meeting Tunisia’s Ansar al-Sharia’, (2013); Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, ‘Raising the Stakes: Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia’s Shift to Jihad’. 52 S. Torelli, F. Merone, F. Cavatorta, ‘Salafism in Tunisia: Challenges and Opportunities for Democratization’, Middle East Policy, 19/4 (2012), pp. 150–151. 53 Haim Malka, William Lawrence, ‘Jihadi-Salafism’s Next Generation’, p. 1. 51

15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 465 new and old patterns of jihadism rose to prominence, challenging the dominant paradigm the group espoused at the doctrinal, strategic and operative levels and obliging it to re-examine its basics tenets. Within this context, the new fitna provoked by the AQ-IS schism reverberated over a jihadi scenario whose foundations were already shaken by the perils and the opportunities the Arab Spring created. This process did not suddenly get underway but lingered for years in the jihadi discourse and that resulted in the reemergence of concepts long dismissed as not influential or relevant to the struggle against the near and the far enemy. How to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the populations controlled by the mujahidin, which strategies should be implemented to lay the foundations of a proto-Islamic State or of a Caliphate, how to limit the apparent success of Islamist movements defined by their acceptance of democratic means, all became questions of extreme importance that required much more than generic appeals or references to a mythicized past. In this framework, al-Qaʿida, the purported Islamic State and Ansar al-Shariʿa elaborated various approaches that, despite their differences, represent different means to elaborate politicized forms of religion aimed at exiting from an armed jihadi-only approach that, despite the important results achieved, has demonstrated its limits. In doing so they delineated the institutional and social boundaries of a new Islamic order to be built over the ashes of an international system and of mainstream/traditional religious interpretations considered corrupt and not in line with the Islamic creed. Theirs has been an effort that, despite the huge levels of violence exerted, is inherently political in its outlook and destined to have a lasting impact well beyond the confines of the different jihadi circles. And it is at the juncture between their global and local agendas, especially where armed jihad meets daʿwa, that the implications of this new posture become more evident. The ‘glocal’ approaches espoused by al-Qaʿida, by its closely aligned Ansar alShariʿa nodes and by the self-proclaimed Islamic State represent different answers to similar demands expressed by a ‘constituency’ that, despite all its grievances and differences, is in search of solutions to problems that armed jihad alone cannot solve. The provision of basic services, the focus on daʿwa efforts and the attention dedicated to relations with the population all serve a multipronged strategy aimed at increasing the support for the

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mujahidin (for continuing their struggle) but also at laying the foundations of socio-political models aimed at reviving the glory of the pristine Islamic community. While the horizon of the narratives promoted by these groups is clearly the supra-national umma, they aspire to give birth to a new, ‘purified’ Islamic polity through processes that takes place hic et nunc. In this way, they are rearticulating the relationship between religion and nationalism in ways and modalities significantly different from the ones generally associated not only to the Westphalian model but also to the ‘Political Islam’ milieu.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christopher Anzalone, ‘The Rise and Decline of al-Shabab in Somalia’, Turkish Review, 4/4 (2014). Mokhtar Awad, ‘The Salafi Dawa of Alexandria: The Politics of a Religious Movement’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 17 (2013). Peter Bergen, The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda, (New York, 2011). Steven Brooke, ‘The Preacher and the Jihadi’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 3 (2006). Jennifer Caffarella, ‘Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria: an Islamic Emirate for al-Qaeda’, Middle East Security Report, 25, Institute for the Study of War, (December 2014). Combating Terrorism Center, ‘Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Letter to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’, Combating Terrorism Center, (2005). Michael M. Eisenstadt, ‘Tribal Engagement: Lessons Learned’, Military Review, (September–October 2007). Jean Pierre Filiu, ‘The Fractured Jihadi Movement in the Sahara’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, 16 (2014). Brian Fishman, ‘After Zarqawi: The Dilemmas and Future of Al Qaeda in Iraq’, The Washington Quarterly, 29/4 (Autumn 2006). Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, ‘Ansar al-Sharia Tunisia’s Long Game: Dawa, Hisba, and Jihad’, ICCT Research Paper, (2013). ———, ‘Raising the Stakes: Ansar al-Sharia in Tunisia’s Shift to Jihad’, ICCT Research Paper, (2014). Rohan Gunaratna, Inside al Qaeda, (New York, 2002).


15. RADICALIZATION AND NEW MODELS OF JIHADISM 467 Bruce Hoffman, ‘What Can We Learn From the Terrorists?’, in Global agenda, (January 2004). ———, Inside Terrorism, (New York, 2006). Al-Hayat Media Center, ‘A Message to the Mujahidin and the Muslim Ummah in the Month of Ramadan’, (July 1, 2014). Seth G. Jones, ‘A Persistent Threat: The Evolution of al-Qa ʿida and Other Salafi Jihadists’, RAND, (2014). Michel Knights, ‘Back with a Vengeance: al-Qaeda in Iraq Rebounds’, IHS Defense, Security & Risk Consulting, (February 24, 2012). N. Lahoud, S. Caudill, L. Collins, G. Koehler-Derrick, D. Rassler, M. al-ʿUbaydi, ‘Letters From Abbottabad: Bin Ladin Sidelined?’, Combating Terrorism Center, (May 3, 2012). Nelly Lahoud, Muhammad al-‘Ubaydi, ‘Jihadi Discourse in the Wake of the Arab Spring’, Combating Terrorism Center, (2013). Nelly. Lahoud, Muhammad. al-ʿUbaydi, D. Milton, B. Price, ‘The Group That Calls Itself a State: Understanding the Evolution and Challenges of the Islamic State’, Combating Terrorism Center, (December 2014). Haim Malka, William Lawrence, ‘Jihadi-Salafism’s Next Generation’, CSIS, Analysis paper, (October 2013). ———, ‘Jihadi-Salafi Rebellion and the Crisis of Authority’, in Religious Radicalism after the Arab Uprising, Ed. Jon Altermann, (Lanham, 2015). William McCants, ‘How Zawahiri Lost al Qaeda. Global Jihad Turns on Itself’, Foreign Affairs, (November 19, 2013). A. Moghadam, B. Fishman, Fault lines in global jihad: organizational, strategic, and ideological fissures, (London, 2011). Andrea Plebani, ‘Ninawa Province: Al-Qaida’s Remaining Stronghold’, Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, (January 2010). ———, ‘The Unfolding Legacy of al-Qa‘ida in Iraq’, in New (and Old) Patterns of Jihadism: al-Qa‘ida, the Islamic State and Beyond, Ed. Andrea Plebani, (Milan, 2014). As-Sahab Media, ‘Ayman al-Zawahiri, ‘General Guidelines for Jihad’, As-Sahab Media, (2013). Robin Simcox, ‘Ansar al-Sharia and Governance in Southern

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Yemen’, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, (2012). SITE, ‘ISIS Spokesman Declares Caliphate, Rebrands Group as “Islamic State”’, SITE, (29 June 2014). S. Torelli, F. Merone, F. Cavatorta, ‘Salafism in Tunisia: Challenges and Opportunities for Democratization’, Middle East Policy, 19, 4 (2012). Joas Wagemakers, ‘Reclaiming scholarly authority: Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi’s critique of jihadi practices’, Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, 35 (2011). ———, ‘Il Ritorno del Jihad Dopo la Primavera’, Oasis, 19 (June 2014). Aaron Zelin, ‘Know Your Ansar al-Sharia’, Foreign Policy, (2012). ———, ‘Jihadism’s Foothold in Libya’, Policy Watch, (September 12, 2012). ———, ‘Maqdisi’s Disciples in Libya and Tunisia’, Foreign Policy, (November 14, 2012). ———, ‘Meeting Tunisia’s Ansar alSharia’, Foreign Policy, (2013).

16. CONCLUSION 1: FROM THE NAHDA TO NOWHERE? PAOLO BRANCA 1

If Eric Hobsbawm was able to define the 20th century as a ‘short’ one for the West – reduced from 1914 (the start of the First World War) to 1991 (the collapse of the Soviet system) – a similar and even more drastic time compression could be hypothesized for the Arab World: between the signing of the Sykes-Picot Treaty (1916) and the stunning defeat in the Six Day War (1967). Like every periodization, it is obviously questionable, and in this case perhaps even paradoxical, if only because of halving historical time. However, the cycle of Arab nationalism and its immediate post-colonial and ‘revolutionary’ multiplications effectively created a significant time span between these two dates and the events connected to them, in both cases negative and linked to its ‘rhetorical’ nature. The ‘betrayal’ of the expectations of the Arab allies by Britain and France was made possible by a situation in the field that was very distant from the still immature ‘national’ claims of the areas concerned, whilst the defeat by Israel went hand in hand with a bombastic discourse that had only shallow roots in socio-institutional reality. However, extending the time scope to include the extraordinary Arab cultural renaissance (Nahda) that took place between the 19th and 20th centuries to the recent Arab Springs, the Prof. Paolo Branca is Associate Professor in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Department of Religious Studies at the Catholic Univesity of Milan. 1

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balance of achievements and energies in the field changes radically both from the intellectual and the popular points of view, and is emancipated from the narrow-mindedness of the inevitably more ideological phase of the phenomenon. What is known as ‘Political Islam’, partially extraneous both to the spirit of the Nahda and to that of the Springs, is showing all its limits at this very time because it is incapable of reconnecting, at least ideally, but above all in perspective, two principal moments – one more project-related and the other more vital or, if preferred, one content and its possible forms – of the modern history of this area: an immense orchestra that is still waiting to perform its own masterpiece. ‘Religious nationalism’ could be the identification process through which, as a sort of ‘Gallicanism’, 2 every Islamic country and each religious minority be empowered by an internally shared understanding of its spiritual awareness.

MORNING HAS BROKEN

Like many countries in Asia and Africa, the Arab-Muslim states also experienced the intense season of their political emancipation in the 19th century and the first part of the 20th century. The very concept of nationalism, as well as the forms it took in the majority of the movements advocating it, was a product of modern Western thought. Asserting it with peoples used to conceiving relations between ethnic groups, language and state in other terms was therefore not totally without problems. In the Muslim world in particular, where belonging to a single Umma was essentially based on religious grounds, for a certain period the pan-Islamic ideal represented an alternative to the penetration of nationalism. It is no coincidence that the greatest representatives of Islamic radicalism often recalled the substantial incompatibility between nationalism and Islam: The Muslim has no other homeland than that in which the Law of God (shariʿa) is in force and where his bonds with others are founded on the basis of dependence on God, he has

Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and political ideology in Renaissance France, (Washington, 2004). 2

16. FROM THE NAHDA TO NOWHERE? no other nationality than his faith, which makes him a member of the Muslim Umma, in the House of Islam (Dar al-Islam) and he has no other relationship than that deriving from the faith and which makes him and his family part of a single family in God. 3

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Nevertheless, nationalism ended up also being successful in Muslim countries for a number of reasons. Over the centuries, whole areas (North Africa, Egypt, Sham, Anatolia, Iraq, Iran, the Indian Subcontinent, etc.) had preserved their own specific character with many elements that could be interpreted as making up a particular national identity that conserved local, unorthodox (in an Islamic sense) customs: non-Islamic elements related to orthopraxis, esoteric tendencies and tradition. In addition, with the progressive weakening of central power, there had been a rebirth of local literary and cultural traditions which, whilst not questioning adhesion to the Umma, represented the most recent expression of the ancient intolerance for an Arabisation that had never been completed (as in the case of the Persians, Berbers, Turks and the Muslims of the Indian Subcontinent) as forthe hegemony of a specific ethnic group in the Umma (as in the case of the Arabs visà-vis the Turks). Lastly, being an integral part of the culture of those European countries that were gradually showing their power and imposing their hegemony over the rest of the world, nationalism seemed the most suitable means both to follow the school of the West in the hope of making up for the gap accumulated over the previous few centuries and to confront it on its own ground. The conceptions and the ideals of nationalism thus also made their entrance into the Arab and Muslim worlds and, paradoxically, were assimilated by each country the more it had to struggle to see them recognised and implemented, thanks to a harsh fight to obtain independence from those who had contributed to making known and spreading these same concepts and ideals. It is also important to emphasize that this contribution was already taken up with the same Islamic world, specifically by religious minorities in the Near and Middle East, Christians and 3

Sayyid Qutb, Maʿalim fi al-tariq, (Beirut, 1995), p. 151.

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Jewish in particular, who had for longer felt a bond to this nationalist trend. The ambiguity of the relationship with the West, considered a model and an obstacle at one and the same time, has its origin precisely in this paradox, although having been enriched by other factors during subsequent phases. In turn, these could not be comprehensible without considering the fact that, however innovative they were, elements from Western culture were neither able to completely undermine traditional ones nor were they able to become amalgamated with them in a complete synthesis, rather becoming superimposed on these traditional elements as an additional and somewhat precarious layer. The priority of the objective of achieving independence meant that the contradiction still remained latent for a certain period of time, but sooner or later it would have been obvious that nationalism necessarily entailed a certain dose of secularisation ‘as it represents an attempt to separate Islam from politics, excluding it from temporal questions. It posits the separation between religion and politics, between religion and state, or at any rate denies Islam the centrality of its role in managing the terrestrial political affairs of the Muslims.’ 4 The fact that many Christian Arabs contributed to the fortune of the movement would appear to show the appeal of new opportunities offered by a national community based on non-confessional criteria. The Islamic movements also followed the anti-colonial struggle, but it was not to be long before they distanced themselves from the ruling classes who, immediately after independence, showed the secular nature of the ideology that had taken them to victory. It also has to be borne in mind that, however epic and exalting it was, the struggle for national liberation had only obtained partial results. It had to be made more substantive with choices that guaranteed economic emancipation, without which political emancipation would have remained purely formal, just as other very delicate questions remained unsolved: hadn’t the nationalism which overcame the colonialists paradoxically P. J. Vatikiotis, Islam and the State, (London, 1987); tr. Islam: stati senza nazioni, (Milano, 1993), p. 17. 4

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legitimised those territorial entities they had created by sharing out the remains of the Ottoman Empire in view of their interests? Which aspirations should have taken precedence in the politics of the new independent states? Those who aimed at overcoming unnatural fragmentation with options in a pan-Arab or even panMuslim perspective? Or should further autonomy have been granted to those groups that had not yet enjoyed the benefits of the battle for independence (ethnic groups such as Berbers and Kurds or religious communities such as the Druze and Maronites)? In this way, just as the Islamic movements could not have failed to adhere to the nationalist campaigns whilst refusing their ideologies, after independence the governments of the new states, despite their more or less explicitly declared secularism, had to call on Islam as a more effective and safer factor of legitimisation and cohesion than others in the face of a complex and delicate situation. The numerous and long-standing questions that belabour this part of the world include some which are truly emblematic: the uncertainties and the incoherence of the support given to the Palestinians by their Arab ‘brothers’ for example, are perhaps the most painful and blatant demonstration of the unresolved contradictions of the nationalist ideology which, not surprisingly, was to definitively enter into crisis after the stinging defeat of 1967. 5 As it accumulated failures and failed to resolve ambiguities, political proto-nationalism progressively also lost its greatest source of legitimacy: the prestige of having achieved independence without transforming it in a ‘patriotic’ feeling able to go beyond religious affiliation as an inclusive characteristic of a singular country. If for adults the battle for independence remained intact, new generations, without direct memories of those events, were to feel even more the disappointment of dashed hopes than satisfaction for the success achieved, now too far removed in time. Gilles Kepel, Jihad. Expansion et Déclin de l’Islamisme, (Paris, 2000), tr. Jihad. Ascesa e Declino, (Roma, 2001), p. 67; Abdelilah Belkeziz, The State in contemporary Islamic Thought, (London, 2015), p. 119f; Peter Mansfield, A History of the Middle East, (London, 2006), p. 280; William L. Cleveland, A History of Modern Middle East, (Boulder 2004), p. 369. 5

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However, the importance of the nationalist season must not be excessively minimised, as it nevertheless seems to preserve a value that is not completely debased. It is no coincidence that the representatives of today’s Islamic radicalism are much more concerned about questioning the value of nationalism than criticising the more typical conceptions of the subsequent phase, that is, the revolutionary one. This latter one has not concerned all Arab-Muslim countries but only a part of them and it has also been shorter and more intellectual and elitist in character. On the other hand, as the last part of the 20th century seems to have clearly shown (and in other parts of the world as well), of the ideologies that have characterised it, nationalism does not seem to be the one that has weakened the most, but on the contrary, the one capable of drawing energy from the crisis of the others that appear far more damaged.

A PIECE OF SPRING LEFT IN THE MIDDLE

The trends that even today appear in the Arab-Islamic world are only the most recent expressions of a vast process of rebirth that has taken place in the last two centuries. This ‘Renaissance’ (Nahda) is the basis of all the currents that have subsequently developed, also of those which, on first examination, would seem to exclude one another. Both the positions of those who maintain the need for a substantial renewal through emancipation from tradition, even on delicate and essential points, and those who, on the contrary, intend to propose once again content and forms of that same tradition, refusing any other model and conceiving ‘reform’ more as ‘restoration’ of what had been put to one side or inadequately applied than as effective change (an ambivalence which can be found, moreover in every modernist movement) have a single origin in the ambiguities and in the polyvalence of the premises laid during the first phase of this ‘reawakening’. The most dynamic and creative period of Muslim thought coincided with the first centuries of the Caliphate when, simultaneously with its great military expansion, Islam was able to create extensive syntheses between its values and the heritage of the cultural traditions it gradually incorporated. After this phase, even before the destruction of the Abbasids by the Mongols in 1258, there had been a progressive doctrinal impoverishment and stringency that accompanied Islam to the threshold of the modern

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era, with an inverse development with respect to that of the Christian West. The first signs of renewal can be traced back to as early as the 18th century, with the anticipation of some themes that were to be systematically proposed again by the subsequent Islamic reform. In this case, we can recall the movement of the Wahhabis, founded in Arabia by Muhammad ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab (1703– 1792), the representative of an intransigent Puritanism aimed at taking Islam back to its original formulation, releasing it from principles and practices of spurious origin that had altered its purity and weakened its strength. 6 The fortune of Wahhabism is due to its alliance with the emerging Saudi dynasty, but outside Arabia its influence was very limited. The need to reform Islam, taking it back to its origins and questioning some parts of the doctrines and traditional practices, nevertheless anticipated some theories that would subsequently have great fortune. Something similar took place more or less at the same time in Cyrenaica, with the movement of the Senussi. 7 Unlike the Wahhabis, they were not hostile to mystical practices, but were even organised as a sort of confraternity. Their purpose however, was similar to that of the puritans of Arabia: they aimed to resume the austere and devout lifestyle of the first believers and shied away from the example of Westernized Muslims who had abandoned the ancient traditions and the authentic Islamic doctrine. There was a deeper and more generalised transformation, capable of investing classic doctrinal formulations and deeply rooted traditions, only when a more direct confrontation and clash with the West, no longer limited only or principally to the politicalmilitary sphere, led to a dramatic turning point. There was an awareness of the need to acquire new knowledge and modern David Commins, The Wahhabi mission and Saudi Arabia, (London, 2006); Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, (Cambridge, 2002); Thomas Hegghammer, Stéphane Lacroix, ‘Rejectionist Islamism in Saudi Arabia: the story of Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi revised’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39 (2007), pp. 103–122. 7 Angelo del Boca, Gli Italiani in Libia, (Bari, 1986); Angelo del Boca, Mohamed Fekini and the Fight to free Lybia, (New York, 2010). 6

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techniques, to renew organisations and institutions and to arise from the ‘stagnation’ (jumud) that characterised cultural life, but this happened suddenly and not at the end of a gradual process of evolution, when the decadence of the Ottoman-Moghul Empires and the expansionist policy of the European powers forced ArabMuslim countries to become aware of their ‘delay’ in many sectors and the urgency to remedy it. The date usually indicated as the starting point of this process is 1798, corresponding to Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt. In actual fact, the Ottoman Empire had introduced significant innovations (such as the press, in 1727 and, in the middle of the same century, the reform of the army) but it cannot be denied that this process was stimulated and accelerated by the French presence in Egypt, and by the British in India, and that it was continued by the local governors and intellectuals even after this presence came to an end. The desire to acquire the knowledge and techniques that ensured superiority for European countries, led, in the following years, to the governors of Egypt, starting from the famous Muhammad ‘Ali, sending special missions of study that did not restrict their interest to science, but became passionately interested in Western culture as a whole and, once they returned home, were determined to promote innovative training institutions, to create the future ruling class, who were offered not only textbooks in Arabic for study but also works of philosophy and literature by the greatest European authors. The contribution made in this direction by a special commission chaired by Rifa’a al-Tahtawi (1801–1873), who translated authors such as Voltaire, Montesquieu and Fénelon from the French and who left us a very interesting diary of his long stay in Paris (1826–1831), 8 was invaluable. In particular, he raised the problem of the language, which should be adapted to the function of an instrument of mass communication and adopt a renewed lexicon and a more elastic structure to be able to express a new reality. The linguistic problem was not limited to the nevertheless central question of diglossia (that is, the difference between the written language, which had remained faithful to the Rifa’at al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris: al-Tahtawi’s visit to France 1826– 1831, (London, 2010). 8

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rules of classical Arabic, and the spoken language) but also took on other important themes such as that of the evolution of the lexicon, which was particularly strongly felt by the intellectuals with a dual background, such as Salama Musa (1887–1958) who wrote: ‘I do not know how to say in Arabic the pieces of furniture that furnish my rooms, whilst I have no difficulty in doing so in English.’ 9 The subject was not completely new, as al-Tahtawi had already discussed it, even raising delicate questions on the structural aspects of the language as an effective vehicle to transmit and develop thought. From a theoretical awareness of the problem, the question subsequently moved to new experiences in the literary field. Far from being reduced to a mere problem of updating the lexicon, the question challenged even the traditional ways of arguing: The encounter with the modern West has not only determined an essential enrichment of the terminology in Arabic and in the surrounding languages; it was the canonical way itself of expressing thought – entrusted to the concatenation of poorly subordinate clauses and with little discipline outside theological and philosophical speculation – that was in terrible need of internal reorganisation and a stricter syntax to reflect the world of the ideas of the modern West. The difficulties in translating works of history or sociology into Arabic, for example, has still not been solved and this is due not so much to lexical gaps but to stylistic aspects proper to Western languages which tend to elude Arabic syntax. 10

Thus, a language famous for its wealth of synonyms, and which claims to boast 500 words for ‘lion’ and as many as 1000 for ‘sword’, suddenly found itself ‘poor’ in the face of new situations. This was the adjective used to describe it by the Lebanese Ibrahim al-Yaziji in the columns of Hadiqat al-akhbar (2/12/1858), where he hastened to add: S. Musa, ‘al-Taraddud bayna al-Sharq wa-l-Gharb’, in al-Yawma waghadan, Aa. Vv., Fi-l-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya, (Beirut, 1980), p. 340. 10 G. E. Von Grunebaum, L’identité culturelle de l’islam, (Paris, 1973), p. 141. 9

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If someone were to find this definition arrogant and offensive towards the intelligence of the Arabs, they should try to translate a speech by a member of the British Parliament or even better, try to render in Arabic the account of a session, an article on European theatre, a political essay, a commercial report, and so on. They would find themselves at every sentence as though they were standing on the edge of a chasm from which they could not climb back up, unless with linguistic acrobatics which would leave every reader disconcerted and in doubt.

This is how the foundations were laid for the birth of that ‘median’ literary Arabic that is still used today in the daily press, in books and in magazines. The role of the newspapers and of articles was fundamental in its genesis and in its evolution, to which some Christian intellectuals made an invaluable contribution, such as the linguist and lexicographer Butrus al-Bustani (1819–1883) of the Syrian Protestant College (founded in 1866, but which became the American University of Beirut in 1919), the printer Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), the poet and painter Khalil Jubran (1883–1931 and above all known in the West for his famous work in verses, The Prophet, which was written in English), the writer Mikha’il Nu’ayma (1889–1988) who, thanks to the privileged relationship between the Lebanese Orthodox Church and Russia, was also able to draw on the Slavic tradition, as well as on the English-speaking one, and, among others, the Lebanese scientist Farah Antun (1874–1922), influenced by authors such as B. de Saint-Pierre and A. Comte and who translated E. Renan and F. Nietzsche. No less significant were the transformations in the legal sector, where models of a Western type began to influence the coding of law, broadly emancipating it from the traditional forms and provisions through a ‘process of acculturation which in the field of law mainly appeared with the reception of foreign normative models’ 11 already evident in the reforms started by Adbul Majid I (1839–1861) in the Ottoman Empire: the famous F. Castro, ‘La codificazione del Diritto privato negli Stati arabi contemporanei’, Rivista di Diritto Civile, 4 (1985), p. 388. 11

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Tanzimat. In the Maghreb, and more precisely in Tunisia, the statesman Khayr al-Din (1820–1889) in particular worked in this way, having noticed that the acquisition of more updated and advanced techniques and instruments of war could not have guaranteed the independence and development of the ArabMuslim countries for long if it did not go hand in hand with a radical revision of the autocratic power of their principles and the evolution of the institutions and public finances based on the model of the modern European states. 12 Opening up to the suggestions of European thought, in these and other sectors, was at first enthusiastic and unconditional, but the receptive phase could not last for long in a non-critical way, not only due to the risk of a loss of identity that such a process entailed, but also because of the political and economic (Berat: a form of commercial dumping implemented by Christian merchants in the Ottoman Empire to trade with the European powers without custom duties, unlike Muslim merchants who suffered discrimination at an economic level.) 13 events that resulted from the West’s policy of colonial aggression, which was the main obstacle on the path to realizing those same ideals that spread in part due to contact with European culture. The themes of the cultural awakening, the recovery of tradition, in which Islam played a leading role, and the yearning for political redemption thus began to move at the same pace. This is clear as early as the time of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–1897), who inspired many of the innovative currents of modern Muslim thought. The serious state of decadence (in his opinion) of the Muslim countries was not only not worthy of their glorious past, but also not even consistent with the genuine spirit of Islam, which sees in even temporal success a sign of its authenticity and divine benevolence. Echoing a famous statement of the Qur’an according to which ‘God does not change the J. Fontaine, ‘Khéreddine, réformiste ou moderniste?’, Institut Belles Lettres Arabes, (1967), p. 30, pp. 75–81; Kh. Al-Tounsi, Essai sur les réformes nécessaires aux Etats musulmans, Ed. M. Morsy, (Paris, 1987). 13 James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, (New York, 2008), tr. in Italian, (Torino, 2009), p. 126. 12

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blessings He has bestowed on men until they change what is in their hearts’ (VIII, 53; XIII, 11), al-Afghani became a ruthless censor of those attitudes that had made Muslims jointly responsible for the crisis that afflicted them. Ignorance and the slavish imitation of tradition in its latest and most decadent formulations; the divisions within the community that opposed sects and ethnic groups required, on the other hand, being supportive in the name of their common faith; the despotic character of the power of most of the Muslim princes and their inclination to the most opportunistic alliances were the subject of his criticism, but he was no less firm and combative in taking the defence of Islam against its detractors. Answering the theory expressed by Ernest Renan in his famous lecture at the Sorbonne in 1883, according to which Islam was alleged to be ‘the negation of science’, al-Afghani started an apologetic but also pro-Islamic current that was destined to develop enormously in the following years and which was to tend to show not only the perfect compatibility between science and faith, but even the superiority of Islam with respect to other religions as far as openness towards the needs of rationality was concerned, attributing the evils suffered by the Muslim world in the first place to an incomplete or incorrect adhesion to the ideals of the faith by its very followers. 14 If, on the one hand, the need was felt for release from the static aspects of traditional religious thought and for a more general maturation, on the other hand awareness was growing that it – although differently interpreted – could provide those elements of continuity which guaranteed the preservation of one’s identity at a time of such vast and radical transformations. Something similar to the spirit of the Protestant Reform can be traced in the thought of al-Afghani, who maintained the need for direct contact with the authority of the Scripture (the Qur’an), without stopping at the traditional interpretation. It is from here that the condemnation of the spirit of “imitation” (taqlid) and the invitation to reopen the “door of ijtihad”, i.e. the “effort of interpretation” which had been Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, (Cambridge, 1983), p. 103f; M. Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, (Cambridge, 2012). 14

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unduly broken off several centuries earlier, come. Some theological topics, such as that of the faith-works relationship and therefore the question of predestination, as well as significant religious phenomena, such as that of the mystical confraternities, very widespread at popular level, were implicitly questioned by this new way of seeing things. However, the failure of al-Afghani’s panIslamic approach was symptomatic of the religious sectarian outlook which during “the age of Gunpowder empires”, but starting even before, had become geographically connected with the peculiarities of macro- regions as north Africa, Iran – Persian area, Sham and Palestine, Mesopotamian plain, Arabic peninsula etc. which during the Islamic formative and classical centuries (VIII- XIV) had already characterized a religious and spiritual local attitude. To confirm this, its main disciple, M. ‘Abduh (1849–1905), while emphasizing, as the mentor, the relevance of ijtihad, he would devote himself more broadly and accurately in an attempt to reform the Islamic religious approach in their own country (in alAzhar in specific) and not generically across the entire Islamic world, even if it was expected that his hope was that from the Arab world could start a wave of renewal that interested the whole Islam. Muhammad ‘Abduh developed the spirit of Muslim reformism in this direction. After a traditional training and the fundamental meeting with al-Afghani, with whom he closely collaborated during a brief period of exile in Paris, ‘Abduh dedicated himself completely to studying and teaching. He thus had the opportunity to make an important contribution to the renewal of Muslim religious thought. In particular in his famous theological work Risalat al-tawhid (Epistle on the divine oneness) he resumed the spirit of the ancient Mu‘tazilite–Kalam schools (9th–10th century) which had worked to harmonize scientific knowledge – then represented by the inheritance of classic philosophy – and religious knowledge on rational grounds. In ‘Abduh’s thought, the harmony between reason and faith, far from being reduced to a simple apologetic subject, is at the basis of a new relationship between nature and revelation, with important consequences on the ethical level. Granting man the ability to know by himself some fundamental truths, before the revelation completes them, he admitted the existence of a natural moral, indispensable for individual responsibility and contrary to every fatalist tendency. On the practical level as well, ‘Abduh distinguished himself for

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courageous initiatives, such as the reforms he suggested for the mosque-university of al-Azhar relative both to the contents of the teachings (introduction of the study of foreign languages and scientific subjects) and the organisation of the life of the students (didactics, allowances, accommodation), and thus contributing with his teachings to the training of a new generation of intellectuals destined to play a leading role in the future affairs of the ArabMuslim world. 15 After his death, the movement that drew inspiration from him was led by the Syrian Rashid Rida (1865–1935) and took the name Salafiyya, 16 with a reference to the ‘first generations’ (salaf) of the Prophet’s followers who most faithfully had followed his example, implementing the teachings of Islam. The ambiguous name itself reveals how an innovative impulse was gradually accompanying, and at times replacing, the tendency to restore Islam to its original forms, privileging the apologetic and revivalist current of the first radical Islamic movements as well, which grew up in the same period, such as that of the Muslim Brotherhood.

HEAVEN ON THEIR MINDS

It clearly emerges from what has been said so far that it would be improper to consider religion an insignificant or marginal element in the confrontation in course, although we must bear in mind the complexity and the contradictory nature of the motivations that lead the ‘religious discourse’ to impose itself forcefully on the scene. The Arab countries and, more in general, the whole Muslim world, seem concerned by a gradual growth and establishment of trends and movements that definitely focus on the Islamisation of the whole society, proposing this option as the only one capable of Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, p. 130f; Ch. Kurzman, Modernist Islam, 1840–1940, (Oxford, 2002), p. 50. 16 H. Laoust, ‘Le Réformisme orthodoxe des ‘Salafiya’ et les caractères généraux de son orientation actuelle’, Revue des Etudes Islamiques, VI/2 (1932), pp. 385–434; H. Laoust, Le Califat dans la doctrine de Rashid Rida, (Paris, 1986). 15

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solving, together with the many problems that affect this part of the world, its crisis of identity and responding to the anxiety for redemption that pervades it. By doing so, they claim to simply propose once again the correct relationship between religion and politics that Islam would necessarily imply and that is alleged to have been at the basis of the extraordinary expansion and flourishing of the golden age of the Muslim civilisation. Up to what point is this ideology effectively linked to the Islamic tradition and to what extent, on the other hand, is it a reinterpretation in response to recent and contingent situations? Do the slogans and strategies of the groups promoting this really belong to a presumed original Islamic model or do they reproduce in a religious key something similar to what a little while ago belonged to movements of a nationalist or revolutionary type? Why do these last two approaches, prevalent until recently, inevitably seem to have entered a crisis and what are the reasons for the great success met by Muslim radicalism that has replaced them? The radical Muslim approach is only one of the many possible. If this were not so, we would have to accept the idea that the Muslims are ‘by their nature’ and ‘necessarily’ aggressive and intolerant, which contrasts with the modus vivendi they have almost always been able (and before anybody could have imagined it) to find with other faiths and cultures, as is even acknowledged by scholars who are less ‘tender’ with Islam: In Muslim history there is nothing comparable to the emancipation, acceptance and integration of believers of other faiths and of non-believers which took place in the West; but similarly there is nothing comparable with the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain, the Inquisition, the auto-dafé or the wars of religion, not to mention the more recent crimes committed or that were allowed to be committed. There were cases of persecution, but these were rare and exceptional. Within certain limits and under certain conditions, Muslim governments were willing to tolerate the observance, even though not the spread of the other revealed monotheistic religions. They also passed a more difficult test, that of tolerating deviant forms of their own religion. Even the polytheists, although in theory condemned by law to choose between conversion and slavery, were in practice tolerated

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when Muslim rule extended to most of India. Only total unbelievers – agnostics or atheists – were beyond the limits of tolerance, but even their expulsion was imposed only when the offence became public and a reason for scandal. The same criterion was applied in tolerating the deviant forms of Islam. 17

It is especially the case today that, with the growing number of Muslims that migration is bringing into our midst, they are perceived with fear, as bearers of a vision and a world that is antithetical and incompatible with the one that we are used to considering as typical of modernity and universally valid. This position conceals an insidious risk of which it would be advisable, if only for reasons of convenience, to be aware. Considering Muslims as a monolithic block under the flag of fundamentalism would mean giving the latter the undeserved title of legitimate and official representative of the whole of Islam. This is exactly its aim ending up by inducing Muslims to form a compact front. That the radical Islam option is present, has countless representatives or sympathizers and for many reasons is to be feared, can certainly not be denied and, indeed, some Muslim authors recognise this: Indeed, Islam is frightening today. It is undeniable. […] Is this something fatal, an inevitable fate? […] The problem facing the Muslim is not easy. In addition to the known difficulties linked with development, there is the weight of tradition and the pervasive nature of religion. To overcome or avoid the obstacle, many formulas have been proposed and attempted. Some admit as a hypothesis that Islam is a closed universe. Others imply the inevitability of cultural uprooting. The greatest effort is that made by those who refuse these extreme positions trying, for over a century, to modernise without this entailing uprooting or isolation from one’s own. If Islam can give itself a meaning today, what will it be about except achieving wider communication between men? Every genuine Muslim believes that his religion addresses the whole human race and that it is valid for every age and for every place. The

B. Lewis, Il suicidio dell’Islam. In che cosa ha sbagliato la civiltà mediorientale, (Milano, 2002), pp. 124–125. 17

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challenge set to it by the modern world is simply that of proving it. 18

Not appreciating the peculiarity of this present historical time and of the expressions of Islam that have been produced in it, could either lead to an inadequate or mistaken comprehension, or to the spread of a distorted vision of Islam as such. It is against this latter tendency that the efforts in particular of all those who underline the profound differences between the present manifestations of this religion and its great tradition are directed. 19 If, however, the claim that the radical Muslim movements are none other but the direct and almost inevitable expression of the presuppositions of Islam is rejected, the problem cannot be liquidated simply by seeking refuge in the easy and illusory consolation offered by the image of a ‘classic’ open and tolerant Islam. Even those who rightly evoke and suggest the latter, opportunely note that sliding towards radical positions did not take place only in some movements, but in the traditional Muslim institutions themselves: O. Carré speaks explicitly of a ‘deviant orthodoxy’ 20 and Nasr. H. Abu Zayd denounces the substantial identity of the ‘religious discourse’ sustained by the so-called moderates (muʾtadilun) no less than by the extremists (mutatarrifun). 21 In conclusion, it can be seen that the national entities that formed after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire gradually had to measure up increasingly to a ‘religious legitimisation’, whilst they accumulated delays and failures on the political and social level, also and perhaps above all because stifling every internal debate as imposed by the prevalently ‘secular’ dictatorial regimes paradoxically fostered Islamist protest as the sole possibility of effective opposition, however demagogical, to their absolutism. However, it is clear that the internal battle in many Islamic countries between secularist tendencies and political H. Boularès, L’islam. La peur et l’espérance, (Paris, 1983), pp. 8–12. O. Carré, L’islam Laico, (Bologna, 1997). 20 Ibid., p. 31. 21 Nasr H. Abu Zayd, The Qur’an: God and Man in communication, (Leiden, 2000); Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam, (New York, 2004). 18 19

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Islam will continue to further polarize states already troubled by economic, anti-corruption and egalitarian causes.

SOMETIMES THEY COME BACK

In 1924, after defeat in World War I and the birth of the Turkish Republic, both the Sultanate and the Caliphate were abolished for good and ‘de jure’. The time was ripe to sanction what was effectively a reality, and indeed the following year a pamphlet destined to cause scandal was published in Egypt. It was al-Islam wa usul al-hukm (Islam and the bases of power) by ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Raziq, in which he maintained the need to introduce a clear distinction between religion and politics because, according to the author, the confusion between the two camps was desired by those holding power only according to their own interests. 22 The Qur’an and the teachings of the Prophet did not contain sufficient elements to maintain that Islam necessarily brings with it a specific organization of society with a specific form of power. The work, alongside some consensus, aroused above all violent criticism and compromised the career of the author. It was followed immediately by the dense essay by A. Sanhouri, Le Califat. Son Evolution vers une Societé des Nations Orientale, 23 in which he criticised the previous author for having confused the legitimacy of the institution of the caliphate with the unworthiness of those who at times had assumed it, but above all for having claimed to apply to the past the contemporary concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘state’, restricting himself to seeking in history what could support his theories rather than studying it as it really was and draw well-grounded conclusions from that analysis. In his turn, however, Sanhouri put forth a less ambitious proposal of restoring the recently ended institution with a sort of Society of Muslim Nations with a vein of pan-Islamism, destined to be overwhelmed by the new and robust nationalist movements. Moreover, something similar had appeared in the Cairo journal alManar as early as 1922 by its editor, the Syrian Rashid Rida, who Abdelilah Belkeziz, The State in contemporary Islamic Thought, p. 99. A. Sanhouri, Le Califat. Son Evolution vers une Societé des Nations Orientale, (Paris, 1926). 22 23

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moved much more cautiously than his master, Muhammad ‘Abduh (died 1905), and he did not hesitate to express himself on the topic in these terms: The situation is so distorted that many men of state, military leaders and politicians, believe that the Muslim institutions, including the Caliphate, are responsible for the present-day decadence and that the Muslims who preserved them could not become a rich and powerful nation, whilst exactly the opposite is true. 24

It is not surprising that the birth of the movement of the Muslim Brotherhood (1928) dates back to the same period, even though in part the ideology and the practice it followed cannot be reduced to a simple claim for the Caliphate, but on the evolution into a theoreticalisation of the Islamic State narrative. 25 The shock of its disappearance probably did not fail to hasten and encourage the expansion of the movement, but now on an agenda of many other priorities, first and foremost of which was liberation from colonialism. Once this objective had been reached, however, there forcefully emerged a conflict between the visions of others who had contributed to it and that of those who more or less explicitly aimed at establishing a Muslim state. For a certain period of time, the controversy focused on the application of the shariʾa, although very early on, some important theoreticians defined taking power as an indispensable condition to fulfil this goal. Furthermore, the secular-national attitude invoked the ‘revolutionary’ selfdetermination process as symptomatic of modernity while, on the contrary, the emerging Islamists approach raised the ‘religious revolution’ to re-structure society as it was in the past but no longer was due to a lack of historical familiarity with the Islamic society of Islam’s ‘Golden Age’. The policy to restore an ‘original’ shariʾa became the mantra of every religious movement without, however, being able to promote a process of historicizing the same, due to H. Laoust, Le Califat dans la doctrine de Rashid Rida, (Damascus, 1938), p. 116. 25 Abdelilah Belkeziz, The State in contemporary Islamic Thought, p. 128. 24

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the lack of a real humanistic understanding of the problem. This is why only now the restoration of the Caliphate is claimed, even though yearned for at length (in the first half of the 20th century), but never identified at least as an objective that could be achieved in the short term. This remains a problem to be clarified. Firstly, we have to bear in mind that the phenomenon of Islamic terrorism (active since the 1980s), although it has also chosen symbolic targets in the West, is not so naïve as to be able to claim directly defeating the American superpower or Israel, but rather, it has always aimed at destabilising the various Arab and Muslim regimes. The intensification of the tension between Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims and the degeneration of the situation in Iraq and Syria, as in Pakistan and Afghanistan, towards fully-fledged civil war are the most eloquent demonstrations of this. The chaos that followed the period of the so-called Arab Springs concerned mainly these two countries, which on the one hand were the historical bases of the Omayyad Caliphate of Damascus and the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad and, moreover, emerged as states exactly one century ago after World War I, the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the iniquitous carving up of the Arab territories between France and Great Britain under the secret Sykes-Picot agreements, reached precisely when Lawrence of Arabia was persuading the rulers to form alliances with the future winners to the detriment of the Turks. The instability of the region, in which tensions of all kinds have accumulated and become exasperated with the sudden collapse of many regimes at the approach of the first centenary of World War I, which produced a partition into poorly laid out, modern national states, sees improvised local players as the impresarios of an ambitious restructuring in which ethnic-religious identities once again represent the nuclei around which to crystallise forms of loyalty and legitimacy that other recipes were unable to guarantee. It was too appetising an opportunity to obtain, in one fell swoop, countless advantages, such as: a. The liquidation of Arab nationalism, or what remains of it, despite its merits in obtaining independence from the colonial powers. It has been denounced for its non-indigenous and therefore illegitimate origin, spurned as pernicious for having encouraged division of the great Umma into fragile and quarrelsome

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entities as Islamic associations and movements, from India to Egypt, propelling fragmentation inside the community;

b. Putting all the regimes that had followed on since then in a state of accusation, for having colluded with foreign powers and being responsible for selling off the Arab cause and Muslim pride, deliberately and systematically prevented from returning to its ancient splendour; c. Overstepping the whole galaxy of Islamist movements which in the past decades have in various ways ‘accepted’ undertaking a sort of long march in the national institutions, giving up the armed struggle or reducing it, guilty of treason also and perhaps above all for having made agreements with the ‘system’, at least formally and gradually directed towards a pluralisation of the political and social forces called to measure up in a political competition inspired by models of the hated West;

d. The interception of a certain number of activities, disappointed and discouraged by both a programme of mobilisation and the connection with symbols that are perhaps archaic but for this reason less worn out by globalisation and the economic crisis that have taken the edge off all the most recent ideologies, and lastly a skilful and unscrupulous media campaign that unites the use of the most refined technological instruments with the recovery of very ancient Messianic expectations which speak of the black flags of the Muslim fighters from the east before the end of ages and the advent of the long-awaited messianic Mahdi.

Every form of government that does not depend directly on Muslim rules is alleged to be without any legitimacy. It is certainly not a new argument, it is sufficient to think that even the Omayyad Caliphate of Damascus, which ended in 750 AD, was accused of being a form of power (mulk) detached from the correct practice based on the religion (din) of the first four ‘rightly guided’ Caliphs. It is, however, only in the most recent period that the anathema (takfir) addressing the whole society deemed ‘no longer Muslim’ or ‘apostate’ has tried to justify a resort to terrorism that strikes indiscriminately, including countless innocent civilians. No compromise therefore seems possible as was stressed by the spokesman of the Islamic State (IS), Abu Muhammad al-Adnani alShami, in his open letter published at the beginning of Ramadan

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2014, in which every authority, save that of the Caliphate, ‘becomes nothing more than kingship, dominance and rule, accompanied with destruction, corruption, oppression, subjugation, fear, and the decadence of the human being and his descent to the level of animals.’ In the same letter, the change of the acronym ISIS to simply IS was announced, the sole form of state admissible for believers who had not been misled by ‘democracy, secularism or nationalism’, therefore invited to recognise themselves in it and to side with it. With the recent uprisings, which in many Arab countries led to the end of authoritarian and corrupt regimes, we saw large crowds mobilised in the name of principles and values that we deemed extraneous or far from the sensibility of populations that are Muslims to a great extent. The absence of anti-Western slogans and those hostile to imperialism, neo-colonialism and Zionism also surprised quite a few observers. Those able to follow the debate more closely and in the original language will have been able to see that it focused on very significant neologisms. The concept of secularism, commonly expressed in Arabic by the term ʿilmaniyya (from ʿilm, ‘science’, or from ʿalam, ‘world’), greatly dependent on typically European rationalist or secularist and slightly dated concepts, has been replaced by the term madaniyya (together with dawla, i.e. ‘state’), which means ‘civil’, not only as opposed to ‘military’ but also to ‘clerical’ or ‘religious’ in a confessional sense. This also explains the strong participation in the protests both by Christian Arabs and by non-radical Muslims. The fact that, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, the Islamist movements won the first national democratic elections would appear contradictory, but it was in part inevitable that those movements, already existing and with deep local roots that for a long time had represented the sole force of organised opposition in those countries, were able to gain an initial advantage. The process of transformation that started with the ‘Arab Springs’ therefore contributed to bringing to the surface even more clearly, many unsolved problems rather than any solution. In this way, dynamics which to date had been repressed or underestimated, and which could still bear fruit in the medium term, appeared. Proof of this are some provocations that representatives of the more traditionalist groups dared to express and, whilst in their paradoxical character or perhaps precisely thanks to it, questioned

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some crucial and decisive points with respect to the position of individuals and groups about a modern state respectful of its citizens’ human rights. The presumed return to the complete and intransigent application of so-called Islamic law, which has never been codified and has the configuration more of case law than positive law, represented the pretext for some not only to propose the restoration (as for example in Tunisia, where it was prohibited) of polygamy, but even of taking concubines. The Qur’an, and the Bible, record slavery as a practice that they try to moderate in its extreme manifestations but do not explicitly prohibit. It is clear that the status of legally admissible ‘non-wives’ would depend on a reintroduction of slavery, which is neither immediately perceivable nor openly claimed by those striving for such restoration, as it cannot be proposed to the sensibility of their supporters. Similarly, when a proposal is made to return to the tax of submission by the Christian minority or minorities of other faiths, a regression towards periods and lifestyles of a feudal nature is implicit. Where the lack of the rule of law could make a status of second-class citizenship legitimate for the followers of religions other than the dominant one, dispensed from military service, for example, and then forced to compensate this ‘privilege’ with a special tribute. When certain propaganda obstinately continues to consider Islam in itself incompatible with democracy, as it is ‘theocratic’, it commits two fundamental mistakes: the first is precisely that of using the wrong term, as the real risk in a Muslim context is not that of theocracy but of Caesaropapism, as it is political power that exploited religion and not vice versa (at least in a Sunni context, which represents about 90% of the Muslim world), the second is to take for granted that all Muslims deem it right or even indispensable to reintroduce the rules borrowed from traditional sources, ignoring that, very probably, many of them would consider it inconceivable to return to slavery or the discrimination of religious minorities. It is however clear that the fairly disastrous control of the consensus obtained by the ‘historical’ radical Muslim groups in cases such as Egypt may have contributed to a favourable return of the flame for the extremist and subversive movements such as the IS. Lastly, but not least important, is the apocalyptic atmosphere that has been reinforced: the dominant chaos almost everywhere and the awareness of living in a period of profound crisis fatally

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brings to the fore symbols and slogans of the ‘end of the world’. The black banner of the neo-Caliphate is linked in the letter mentioned earlier to the one that the real believers will raise close to the Last Judgement to ‘pass it to the Messiah’ in the decisive clash between the powers of good and of evil. How this amalgamation of catastrophe and epochal expectations can attract activists both from inside the Muslim world and from elsewhere can be intuited, although perhaps the phenomenon of the ‘foreign fighters’ has an importance that is more symbolic and mediaworthy than it is effective. On 19th September 2014, over one hundred and twenty Muslim scholars published an open letter addressed to the recently self-declared Caliphate, known by a title that does not appear: You Don’t Understand Islam. The text tries to confute the arguments of the ‘speech of establishment’ by al-Baghdadi with ample recourse to verses of the Qur’an and sayings of the Prophet. If on the one hand this was to some extent inevitable, on the other it shows how far the pseudo-Caliph has forced his adversaries to confront him on the same ground, which in itself is already emblematic. A conflict on the interpretation of the sources reveals on the one hand how powerful they still are but, on the other hand, also shows a frightening lack of elaborating an alternative political discourse, the result of a stagnation and even of an intellectual and pernicious regression. It is, however, significant that many practices of the IS – such as killing innocent and unarmed civilians or diplomatic emissaries, the inadmissible ‘excommunication’ of other Muslims, the lack of respect for religious minorities, the forced conversions, the indiscriminate application of corporal punishment and the destruction of places dear to popular piety – are condemned precisely by those sources. On the political side, however, it is admitted that the Caliphate is an institution that the Muslims should restore, but without acknowledging whether or not alBaghdadi has the necessary authority to claim it. Much less clear is under whom and which conditions it could be done. Love for one’s country, understood not as the Arab or Muslim Umma, is defended, just as the request for Muslims to emigrate to finally live under the protection of a real Muslim state, and even less so to support it and defend it, is deemed absurd. The historical reasons and, above all, the experience of millions of believers, who for

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centuries have led an existence perfectly in line with the principles and precepts of Islam in highly varied socio-political conditions, are unfortunately not able to upset a mythical model, which seems to resist every contextualisation and articulated critical analysis. The return to the religious identity in recent decades in the entire Islamic world, which is also evident considering religious minorities that exist in the Middle East – Israel included – increased the linked prominence between the individual state, its plural-religious identity and the need to recognize it as a clear process of nationalization of religion. Al-Qaedism in the past, as IS today, is, as an expression of a neo-global, violent, pan-Islamic approach, historically appointed to fail. ‘Religious nationalism’, however, could be one of the potential panoramas of the IslamicArab world. However, as this book is able to explain, the plurality of differences is manifest in any sub-area, and if Egypt or Lebanon, on one side, have been able to overcome civil wars and ongoing difficult phases, others, as Syria, on the other, have failed to shape a political-religious identity able to survive to internally and externally provoked conflagrations. Only the future will clarify this conundrum.

CONCLUSION

Some ‘classic’ problems of the relationship between religion and politics in an Islamic context thus appear once again, although with a new spirit and in new forms. It is a question that, by its very nature, is destined never to be resolved once and for all, but constantly reinterpreted in the light both of its oldest presuppositions and the needs and concerns of the present. But the reality of the modern nation states, which have gradually formed in the whole of the Muslim area, is unlikely to be questioned, let alone by sectarian and extremist groups, who are strongly localized and determined by contingent conflicts. This is the paradigmatic aspect of the contemporary Islamic world: the coexistence of a limited minority of fake utopians who are still following an unreal, panMuslim attitude that Islamic formative history and the contemporary one have annihilated, with that of a majority of Muslim supporters of Islamic national movements in Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and Pakistan, as in others, which started from the beginning of the 20th century to shape Islamic political parties related to specific national identities.

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The resurrection of a Caliphate, at least as the supreme moral authority of the immense and structured Muslim Umma, still lacks the minimum basic requisites, all the rest plays in favour of a further and dramatic ethnic and religious fragmentation: more than a dream it is a nightmare, paid for very dearly not only by the Middle East’s minorities, but also by the whole of the population that risks no longer finding in Islam that ethical and spiritual reference which, in spite of everything, it has represented for millions and millions of believers for centuries. For the Arabs in particular, all this is taking place as though every achievement made in the past two centuries, and the even richer and multi-faceted experience of the previous eras, had simply never existed. Muslim reformism itself, which during the Nahda was able to open up new perspectives in a general dynamic of renewal, were scuppered by colonialism and authoritarian involutions which blocked every possibility of real evolution. What’s more, it had to do so meeting contrasting needs and almost never in a position of real independence from political power. The religious slogans that re-emerge are therefore worn out right from the start and claim in vain to meet that anxiety for redemption and national rebirth that nevertheless determine its relative success, in the absence of alternatives. What has not been realised in the institutions and in the practices of only apparently modern states, has no chance of coming about by virtue of slogans that are more demagogical than charismatic, ambitious in intention and atrocious in practice, once again to the detriment of peoples who are hardly recognised as citizens and seem condemned to remain always, and in any case, subjects. Subjects of petro-dollar sultanates who largely masterminded the birth of IS and whose sole objective is to preserve their power as long as possible, and to limit the political success of local national religious parties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, which, as for the Iranian revolution of 1979, could find supporters aware that ‘Political Islam’ is different from the autarchic paradises artificially created in the Gulf. Religious nationalism clearly remained the Lernaean-Hydra of the introduction because, on one side, the trivialization of Islam had been strongly encouraged in the last decades by neo-Salafism and media, in contrast with the previous Nahda’s attitude, while, on the other, the Western world, during the Cold War and after it, had continued to view ‘Political Islam’ as the problem and not the

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solution. The inability of Euro-US ‘propaganda’ to consider the Islamic world as historically related with a religious political attitude – as if the leading Democrazia Cristiana party in Italy had not existed for fifty years after WWII or Germany were not led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – is emblematically connected with a neo-Orientalist attitude. Finally, a necessary distinction between state institution and personal faith (as a communitarian but also private aspect), as well as crime and sin, should be healthy also for Islamic parties that are still unable to update their political action, contributing to the stagnation of religious culture within the society. Equality and theodicy are still prisoner and under threat from the religious aversion to modernity, in antithesis to the revolutionary Islamic attitude towards both and which is rooted within its formative and classical historical period (13th–14th centuries). Islamic political parties are symptomatically expressions of two main characteristics: the religious attitude to recognize the role of political system in the country and the idea that a party could be the expression of a national religious position, both in contrast with the ‘caliphate propaganda’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abdelilah Belkeziz, The State in Contermporary Islamic Thought, (London, 2015). Nasr H. Abu Zayd, The Qur’an: God and Man in communication, (Leiden, 2000). ———, Voice of an Exile: Reflections on Islam, (New York, 2004). H. Boularès, L’islam. La peur et l’espérance, (Paris, 1983). Olivier Carré, L’islam Laico, (Bologna, 1997). F. Castro, ‘La codificazione del Diritto privato negli Stati arabi contemporanei’, Rivista di Diritto Civile, 4 (1985). David Commins, The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, (London, 2006). William L. Cleveland, A History of Modern Middle East, (Boulder, 2004). Angelo del Boca, Gli Italiani in Libia, (Bari, 1986). ———, Mohamed Fekini and the Fight to free Lybia, (New York, 2010).

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James L. Gelvin, The Modern Middle East, (New York, 2008), tr. Storia del Medio Oriente Moderno, (Torino, 2009). Thomas Hegghammer, Stéphane Lacroix, ‘Rejectionist Islamism in Saudi Arabia: the story of Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi revised’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 39 (2007). Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939, (Cambridge, 1983). Gilles Kepel, Jihad. Expansion and Déclin de l’Islamisme, (Paris, 2000), tr. Jihad. Ascesa e Declino, (Roma, 2001). Ch. Kurzman, Modernist Islam, 1840–1940, (Oxford, 2002). H. Laoust, Le Califat dans la doctrine de Rashid Rida, (Paris, 1986). Bernard Lewis, Il suicidio dell’Islam. In che cosa ha sbagliato la civiltà mediorientale, (Milano, 2002). Peter Mansfield, A History of Middle East, (London, 2006) S. Musa, “al-Taraddud bayna al-Sharq wa-l-Gharb”, in al-Yawma wa-ghadan”, Aa. Vv., Fi-l qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya, (Beirut, 1980) Jotham Parsons, The Church in the Republic: Gallicanism and Political Ideology in Renaissance France, (Washington, 2004). Sayyid Qubt, Ma‘alim fi al-Tariq, (Beirut, 1995). Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, (Cambridge, 2002). A. Sanhouri, Le Califat. Son Evolution vers une Societé des Nations Orientale, (Paris, 1926). Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi, An Imam in Paris: al-Tahtawi’s visit to France 1826– 1831, (London, 2010). Kh. Al-Tounsi, Essai sur les réformes nécessaires aux Etats musulmans, Ed. M. Morsy, (Paris, 1987). P. J. Vatikiotis, Islam and the State, (New York, 1987), tr. Islam: stati senza nazioni, (Milano, 1993). G. E. Von Grunebaum, L’identité culturelle de l’Islam, (Paris, 1973). M. Qasim Zaman, Modern Islamic Thought in a Radical Age, (Cambridge, 2012).

17. CONCLUSION 2: DEMOCRACY, NATIONALISM AND RELIGION IN THE ARAB WORLD YOUSSEF M. CHOUEIRI 1

Nationalism and religion are two social forces that dominated world history for centuries. Moreover, while religion is definitely ancient and nationalism is modern, both seem intent on swapping their histories by pretending to be both ancient and modern at the same time. Nationalism excels in rooting itself in the distant past of its community, appropriating in the process all that community had managed to produce since its first settlement in a particular strip of territory. Religion, on the other hand, has become adept at updating and upgrading its relevance and validity by making inroads into various facets of modernity. Whether the purpose of such an exercise is to gain legitimacy or the mere desire to ensure the survival of particular concepts and institutions, both seem to be intent on occupying a permanent space or sphere of influence. It is for this reason that their relationship has often been fraught with tensions and conflict, alternating at particular historical junctures with attempts of reconciliation or co-existence. One cannot fail in this respect to pinpoint phases of extreme tension, giving way at an appropriate moment to periods of negotiations aimed at arriving at some provisional accommodation of the interests of both parties. Although some scholars still insist on rooting the origins of nationalism in the distant past, most contemporary scholarship Youssef M. Choueiri is Professor in Modern Arab & Middle Eastern History at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. 1

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tends to highlight its relatively modern appearance. 2 Pride of priority is normally assigned to a cluster of Western European countries said to have embarked on this novel adventure as result of a number of interrelated factors. These factors may include centralisation of bureaucratic, administrative and political authority under a newly invigorated monarchy, entailing in the process the gradual weakening of feudal systems, which tended to fragment a certain national territory into separate fiefdoms or feudal estates. Moreover, by removing intermediary systems of social organisation and concentrating power in the institution of the monarchy, cities and towns were granted autonomy, with their corporate personality fully recognised under the leadership of a new bourgeois class. These urban centres were thus empowered to impart their own ethos and felt motivated to refine their modern culture, channeling their energies into the creation of wealth, scientific discoveries, geographic explorations and industrial inventions. The unification of national markets, the establishment of efficient military and administrative institutions and the restless spirit of a new bourgeois class gave rise to what was called the principle of nationality. 3 This principle of nationality, or what we call today nationalism/patriotism, paved the way for the assertion of the will of the people as opposed to that of the monarch or his aristocratic coterie. The feeling of patriotism or nationality was anchored in a common popular desire to form one single government accountable to the will of the elected representatives of that nationality. Thus, the birth of nationalism was closely tied to the liberal notion of democracy, whereby kings were stripped of their divine power and the sovereignty of the national will was declared the absolute criterion of a modern system of government. On the various discussions relating to the historical trajectory of nationalism, see: Youssef Choueiri, Arab Nationalism: A History, (Oxford, 2005), pp. 1–15. 3 See, for example, John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Everyman, (London, 1910), pp. 391–94 and Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 46–79. 2

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This liberal notion of nationality and government made itself felt across a wide spectrum of social forces and territories, particularly with the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the American and French Revolutions in the second half of the eighteenth century. European expansion and colonialism, fuelled by the twin French and Industrial revolutions, led in their turn to movements of national resistance and liberation, so that by the middle of the twentieth century nationalism, under different guises and designations, seemed to form the spirit of the age. It was under these conditions that religion became a subordinate element or a variable that entered into the formation of a novel totality. Reforming religion, be it with the advent of Protestantism, or the assault of the rationalist formulas of the Enlightenment, became the watchword of successive generations. Hence, the twin discourses of liberalism and nationality found their ultimate articulation in the principle of secularism. While secularism denoted a variety of theoretical discourses and applications, ranging from the simple act of separating religion and state, assigning each one its particular field of operation, to the idea of elevating secularism to a comprehensive philosophy of life, with the metaphysical world being reduced to a superstitious remnant of a bygone age, religion figured in all these divergent experiments as the main contentious target. In other words, religion was required by both its opponents and adherents to adjust itself to a new age of rationalism, scientific thought and verifiable facts. In this intellectual encounter or in the midst of violent confrontations, religion underwent radical changes in its intellectual heritage, methods of communication and definition of its mission. While it is not feasible in this context to enumerate all the responses of religion to these theoretical and practical challenges, suffice it to say that as a result of what we call modernity 4 all Although postmodernity is assumed to have replaced modernity in the second half of the twentieth century, it seems that our present era is still habitually considered to be simply modern or late modern, but with new features and characteristics being added to distinguish it from its earlier versions. See, for example, Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Polity, (Cambridge, 1991). 4

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religions have been transformed, with some accepting a more limited role, and others offering temporary concessions in the hope of regaining lost positions, and yet others reasserting their function by leaping across the centuries in a desperate and perhaps futile attempt to breathe life into imagined, hidden treasures of magnificent splendour and majestic grandeur. Consequently, religion in its Abrahamic and other forms has been subject to the same transformations that gripped all societies in our modern era. It is in this context that this chapter will attempt to rehabilitate the study of democracy in the Arab world against the background of its nationalist and religious heritage. Democracy is thus brought into the foreground as the latest and most potent symbol of modernity. Studying nationalism and religion on their own is no longer feasible or fruitful, as I hope to show by singling out the common features of the Arab Spring, despite its short-term eclipse or stalled progress. Democracy is here understood to consist of features that stretch beyond a political process or an administrative instrument of government. Hence, in addition to its direct political significance, it should embrace all the social, economic, cultural and ethical values of human rights. Thus, democracy comprises political, civil and social rights embodied in the idea and practice of citizenship. Democracy is here taken to indicate the ability of the citizens of a country to exercise their right to elect, control and participate in the institutions of their state according to a clearly delineated constitution based on the rule of law, accountability, social justice and transparency. Moreover, democracy has always been an unfolding process rather than a single event, or simply the sum total of discrete happenings. Hence, an interpretation that attempts to locate Arab democracy in its historical and human context, delineating thereby its early evolution and subsequent development, is capable of yielding illuminating results that stand a good chance of pinpointing the trajectory of future trends, including culture, religion and national interests. Democracy has never been a frozen moment in history, fully born and armed with all its requisite institutions, concepts and ideals. This chapter is thus structured to grasp, in its first section, the significance of the Arab Spring as a democratic process that seemed to transcend both religion and nationalism, with particular

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reference to Tunisia and Egypt. In its second section, it tries to show how a nuanced history of democracy in the Arab world serves to highlight phases of failures or successes as integral parts of long-term processes and multiple factors, while at same time bearing in mind the other variables mentioned above. Both religion and nationalism are in this instance subsumed under the aegis of a potent hegemony with democracy its dominant component.

AN ARAB SPRING?

In late December 2010 and early January 2011 two long-reigning Arab presidents were toppled as a result of mass protests. The first to go was the Tunisian president, Zein al-‘Abidin Ben ‘Ali, who fled Tunisia on 14 January 2011, never to return. He had been ruling the country since November 1987. The second, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, chose not to flee his country, offering instead his resignation on 11 February 2011, having assumed power in 1981. Other mass protests almost instantly erupted in other Arab countries, particularly in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Morocco and Jordan. The internal dynamics of these movements were driven by similar grievances and modes of struggle: widespread corruption and political oppression, whereas the mass responses were largely and deliberately non-violent, with decisions taken on mobilisation by exchanging views on virtual social networks. Moreover, this political activism announced the advent of new social forces characterised by youth, pragmatism and determination. These three qualities underlined the fact that the slogans of a preceding generation have been left behind. Nevertheless, even in the arrival of a new political culture, the characteristic of pragmatism was still tinged with idealism, whereby both were supposed to reinforce each other, espousing thereby core values that never entertained compromise, despair, surrender or defeat. Democracy underpinned all slogans and demands, and appeared to bestow legitimacy on a diverse spectrum of political programmes. 5 A flood of studies has been published on the Arab Spring. I found the following particularly informative or useful: Lin Noueihed, 5

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The unfolding revolutions had a clear aim: to bring down and dismantle the old regimes of almost all Arab countries, be they republican or monarchist. However, the first category (republican) seemed to bear the brunt of popular anger, while the second variety (monarchist) managed to escape with minimum damage to its hold on power. Moreover, the unfolding procedure and mode of dismantling a particular regime, as well as the responses of these regimes, varied widely from one country to the other, entrenching in the process certain patterns, which only emerged with an articulated clarity at least two years later. The Tunisian transition is certainly smoother; less complicated and can already boast a number of concrete achievements. Such a smooth transition, despite its slow pace, was denied the second wave of the Arab Spring whereby countries, such as Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq, entered a vicious circle of violence and counterviolence, with the balance of political power oscillating from one side to the other along a spectrum of new social forces not yet able to tip the balance in their favour. 6 In Egypt, on the other hand, the transition appeared to be cumbersome, improvised or simply consisting of a series of spontaneous reactions of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), and later of the Muslim Brothers, to popular pressure and mass demonstrations. 7 However, before we try to highlight the differences between Tunisia and Charles Warren, The Battle for The Arab Spring, (New Haven, 2012); F. Gregory Gause III, ‘Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring?’, Foreign Affairs, 90/4 (2011), pp. 81–90; Ismail Salwa, ‘Urban Subalterns in the Arab Revolutions: Cairo and Damascus in Comparative Perspective’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55/4 (2013), pp. 865–94. George Joffe, ‘The Arab spring in North Africa: origins and prospects’, The Journal of North African Studies, 16/4 (2011), pp. 507–535. 6 Michael Willis, Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring, (Oxford, 2014), pp. 155– 202. 7 The Egyptian Armed Forces could be said to have dominated their country’s political life since the 1952 Free Officers coup d’état.

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Egypt, it would be more useful to point to similarities, which were the direct product of the events of the two revolutions. One could list these similarities according to clear-cut categories: psychological, political, economic, cultural and so on. However, such an exercise would do violence to a much more nuanced situation and could lead to the emergence of a simplified picture instead of a fuller version of revolutionary configurations. It is in this context that we must not lose sight of the complexity of a fluid situation that is largely the outcome of thousands of decisions that are no longer confined to committees, compact groups or boards of directors. Nevertheless, for the sake of analytical clarity, we have to isolate or single out a cluster of factors, then try to see how they articulate, or to what extent they manage to fit into slots that are supposed to form our political puzzle. What most scholars and political analysts seem to agree on are the following. The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have banished fear, of all types, from their political and personal arenas, as well as those of the Arab World at large. People, of all ages, are no longer afraid to voice their opinion, organize protests and sit-ins to make such an opinion widely known. More importantly, by upholding such beliefs, these groups are prepared to defend this right in a peaceful and orderly way, but in a manner underpinned by the readiness to pay the required price rather than give up or retreat. It is this lesson that will form the lasting legacy of these two countries. Moreover, it must be underlined that this is no small feat; its repercussions will resonate for years to come until we are in a better position to study their significance in the formation of a new political culture in the Arab countries. In order to appreciate more fully the genesis of such a feeling of defiance, confidence and determination, one has to dwell at length on the culture of intimidation, blackmail and constant surveillance practiced by Arab regimes as part of their repressive governance. 8 Such loss of fear is directly related to the loss of legitimacy by established regimes and the slow maturation All Arab regimes, particularly the republican variety, developed extensive networks of domestic intelligence, while failing to do so in the external arena. 8

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of counter-legitimacies derived from new sources of human rights values. 9 The two uprisings teach us that it is always useful and beneficial to be open-minded and willing to gain firsthand knowledge of the experiences of new social movements. This means that reading the Qur’an or Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth century Tunisian historian, 10 will not throw much light on what is at stake in either Tunisia or Egypt. This is a lesson for all diplomats, journalists and Orientalists who, despite the efforts of Edward Said and his numerous colleagues, still persist in seeing Arab societies as either a collection of religious devotees or segmented groups of tribal confederations. 11 Thus, Arab identity, which nonetheless, could include religious and tribal elements, is largely submerged or suppressed. This was no less an act of oppression than that of the direct material repressions of various Arab regimes. Egypt and Tunisia have put paid to such claims. Arab societies value and cherish their national identities and do not wish to relinquish them for the sake of other nebulous or concocted designations. Nor is it particularly enlightening to pinpoint particular ideas and trace them back to some pundit or theorist. This is on the whole the case when we bear in mind those Arab intellectuals who were at first at a loss as to how to respond or react to such spontaneous outpourings of raw popular emotions. The same goes for Islamist organizations, including the Muslim

This was related to the growth of ‘civil society’ organisations, despite their divergent origins or effectiveness. 10 On Ibn Khaldun and his pessimistic or cyclical theory of Arab history, see, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Ibn Khaldun: An Essay in Reinterpretation, (London, 1990), Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib. An Interpretive Essay, (Princeton, 1977), pp. 218–223. 11 Olivier Roy, ‘The Transformation of the Arab World’, Journal of Democracy, 23/3 (2012), pp. 5–18; Sami Zubaida, ‘The Arab Spring in the Historical Context of Middle East Politics’, Economy and Society, 41/4 (2012), pp. 568–579. 9

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Brothers, 12 who were at first reluctant to plunge into the roaring tide of undefined slogans of a bunch of adolescents or teenagers. In other words, these revolutions have defined more concretely and directly the national identities of their societies and how their various ingredients cohere to merge into a new culture of liberal values, social justice and human dignity. In this sense, the idea of dubbing these movements as being those of young men and women is largely true and cannot be denied in spite of the huffing and puffing of old men in grey suits still trying to cling to power or prolong their sell-by date. Moreover, such assertions do not ignore the cycles of violence and sectarian strife that have gripped several Arab societies, seeing them instead as tragic but largely unavoidable consequences of a drawn-out process. Another lesson to be learnt has to do with our rigid criteria for measuring democracy. 13 It is no longer feasible to insist on a set of factors or indicators, the availability or shortage of which determines the potential presence or expectant absence of democracy in its various forms and incarnations. While one cannot deny the crucial importance of a well-established middle class, the diffusion of literacy, the level of average incomes, the consumption of certain goods and scores of other indicators, we need to move away from the general sets of factors, normally derived from European or Northern American contexts, and conduct our own fieldwork with its parameters and recipes. It is perhaps the discovery or articulation of our new indicators that are likely to open the way for fresh studies and imaginative policies. Although further research is still needed, 14 we may reach a provisional conclusion, based on data and information culled from our recent past: Arab republics, despite all their shortcomings and methods of repression, created the prerequisites for such uprisings, particularly with reference to unifying the national territory in an Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Arabic means Muslim Brothers or Brethren. The widely-used term ‘Brotherhood’ is therefore incorrect. 13 Benjamin Weiser, ‘Third Wave’-Democracies in Latin America. The impact of socio-economic development on democratization, (Verlag, 2014). 14 For diverse Arab views see, Khair el-Din Haseeb (ed.), The Arab Spring: Critical Analyses, (London, 2015). 12

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overarching identity, as well as generating the momentum for change as a result of the gap between rising expectations and meager results. Hence, notwithstanding the current fragmentation or partition of Syria and Iraq, a sense of national identity has established itself across the Arab world, enjoining local, national and religious notions. At a more immediate level, the armed forces in both countries played a pivotal role in hastening the resignation and departure of the head of state. However, in Tunisia the army simply ensured the neutralization of the security services, but refrained for historical and organizational reasons from presiding over the transitional period. In Egypt, the armed forces did perform a similar task, but chose to undertake the additional task of managing the transition to democracy, albeit in a haphazard fashion. It is perhaps for these reasons that Tunisia seems more certain and less troubled about this phase of the transition. However, should the army and the security services decide to join forces and refuse to intervene on behalf of the opposition, a state of political stalemate or civil war is likely to be the outcome. Owing to the relative success of these two uprisings, dynastic succession in Arab republics has become a thing of the past. Syria may well turn out to be the exception that proves the rule. The social and economic message emanating from both countries has not yet been clearly articulated, nor has it been made an integral part of the new political landscape. All major revolutions in our modern history carried out a comprehensive programme of social and economic change. By dismantling the old order, the new system of government ushers in a new era and stamps it with its own slogans and language. More importantly, the population has to witness and have direct experience of such changes. Up till now, such a state of affairs is still largely absent or barely felt across society. So far, the Arab Spring seems to meander in a restricted political space, almost oblivious to the torrent of socio-economic demands that has begun to engulf the entire new landscape. 15 Although the eruption of a wide variety of A set of ethnic, sectarian and other conflicts have erupted in a number of Arab countries in the wake of the Arab Spring. These 15

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civil wars has virtually annulled the positive dimensions of the Arab Spring, this may turn out in the long run to be an inevitable outcome of a long process. Be that as it may, the Arab World can be said to have crossed the democratic threshold. Arab countries as a whole have embarked or been forced to embark on an arduous journey of discovery and self-determination. Although setbacks may occur, or new constitutional arrangements may be revisited as in Egypt following mass demonstrations and the intervention of the armed forces in July 2013, historical change at all levels of society is here to stay. Consequently, a purely Islamist system of government as a revolutionary model will gradually fade away, so will other ephemeral Jihadist movements, including the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Rehabilitating Arab democracy will, sooner or later, impart a new momentum to the dynamics of civil society across the Arab world, renewing in the process the drive for Arab unification. Articulating a clearer vision of its identity will involve in this context discarding the austere ideology of traditional Arab nationalism. A feeling of Arab patriotism or Arabism will emerge, fully at ease with democracy, human rights and the ideals of modernity. Arabism in this context may yet acquire a comprehensive economic and political programme, and fashion a new national identity having the human rights of all its citizens, irrespective of religion, creed or ethnic background, as its constituent ingredients. The Arab world is not simply a series of oil fields dotting barren deserts. It is a home to hundreds of millions of young men and women whose aspirations extend far beyond guarding the strategic interests of Western powers. It is for these reasons that a historical interpretation of Arab democracy may serve as good exercise in shedding light on what is meant by intrinsic human rights.

conflicts, with heavy losses of life and material destruction, have engulfed Syria, Libya, Yemen and Iraq and other Arab states.

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A HISTORY OF ARAB DEMOCRACY

This section seeks to investigate the emergence and development of democracy in the Arab World in its historical and contemporary contexts. Democracy is in its turn understood to denote an agreed form of elite or popular participation in conducting the affairs of state and society. Democracy is thus a political discourse, a set of institutions and established norms of behaviour. The timeframe covered in this section extends from the nineteenth century to the present day. By doing so, it is envisaged that underlying factors responsible for certain recurring patterns of failure and success will be identified in an effort to situate present trends within a well defined historical context. In other words, my aim is to test the proposal that the past as well as the future of democracy in the Arab World have to be understood as a long-term problem engendered by historical conjunctures, which are in turn structured by internal norms of change and continuity, regional alignments and international balances of power. This is followed by a general outline designed to capture three significant moments in Arab and Islamic history, singled out for setting in motion a constant and interactive dialogue with the other. Nationalism and religion are treated as two ingredients that are perceptible within this paradigmatic shift of democratic development.

CONTEMPORARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT

While some theoretical approaches still allude to a cluster of perennial factors, such as Islam or family structures, as explanatory devices accounting for the lack of democracy in the Arab World, others use more sophisticated methodologies based on concepts tied to their historical context and social space. However, these same factors (religion and patriarchal norms) were cited in the past to account for the lack of democratic institutions in Spain and Portugal, as well as Latin America. Consequently, these new approaches have shifted the debate away from the familiar perennial terrain, thereby according greater importance and paying closer attention to the internal dynamics of political transition, aborted patterns of socio-economic development and the characteristics of civil society. Moreover, the international context,

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torn by rivalries and competitive policies of its major powers, has been incorporated into this explanatory scheme. Although studies on the requisites of democracy in the developing world continue to proliferate, very few scholars have devoted their attention to the historical contours and political details of the mechanisms of transition from authoritarianism to liberalism. This is all the more so with respect to the modes of transition and accommodation to modernity, or wrestling with the implications of modernisation policies, in the Arab world in particular, and the Middle East in general.

THEORETICAL MODELS

Theoretical models offered by the school of modernisation have now been largely bypassed or subjected to severe criticism. 16 Having as its units of analysis a cluster of indicators and variables, such as literacy rates, per capita income, indices of technological development and modern notions of citizenship, it plots linear causative chains whereby correlations are established between levels of education, for example, and the emergence of a sense of civic awareness. By creating an artificial polarity between ‘traditions’ on the one hand, and ‘modernity’ on the other, this school is judged to be largely incapable of grasping the complex and multilayered nuances of both the modern and the traditional scheme of things. Saudi Arabia is often cited as an example of a modernised society that has so far failed to embrace democracy, whereas Turkey is shown to have embarked on a thorough democratisation programme in the 1940s without enjoying the benefit of highly developed social and economic structures. Other models represented by the theoretical formulations of the structural school (Barrington Moore and others), 17 focus their The most popular representative of this genre is that by Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, (New York, 1958). 17 See, in particular, Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, (Harmondsworth, 1966). 16

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analysis on class formations, social structures and their historical trajectory within a particular international order. However, it is the shifting interrelationships of these structural blocs, assumed to include classes, state power and capitalist relations of production that receive systematic treatment. In this sense, all social actors anchored in economic interests and responding at the same time to structural determinants strive to work out a strategy of attaining political power. Democracy announces its arrival when a new balance of power establishes itself as the direct outcome of these social struggles. Such a balance of power is maintained and becomes a sustainable enterprise, whenever a vigorous urban middle class steps forward to assert its dominance (or hegemony) and impose its political ideology. By contrast, the absence of a vigorous middle class, whereby landlords and peasants continue to dictate the pace of social struggles and development, allows state institutions to perpetuate a non-democratic system of government. However, a third school, normally dubbed the Transition School, treats social indicators of modernisation and political balances of power as necessary contextual conditions, but not sufficiently adequate to account for the inauguration of democratic systems of government. 18 It therefore singles out political choices made by competing elites and the sort of negotiating techniques used to strike a new deal or reach a compromise. Thus, instead of social categories and actors representing landlords, peasants, the bourgeoisie and the working class, we have political and ideological labels denoting compact groups of soft liners and hardliners, opportunists, moderates and extremists. Hence, the particular alignment of one group with another, taken as a deliberate and rational choice, determines the onset of the transition stage to democracy, as well as its subsequent consolidation, or its failure to materialise. Nevertheless, such a neat and logical state of affairs is rarely the case in either the developed or developing world. Although choices are often made in political alignments, it is A good introduction to this theory is: Yossi Shain, Juan J. Linz, Between States: Interim Governments and Democratic Transitions, (New York, 1995). 18

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seldom the case that such choices are taken as mere rational decisions irrespective of culture, social conditions or overwhelming odds in the national and international environments.

POLITICAL CULTURE

It is important to point out that all these models afford us the opportunity to realise how changing structural relations are themselves embedded in social conditions which are, in turn, the product of the degree of economic development and the relative or dominant role played by state institutions. Thus, one has to investigate how modern political culture and democratic norms become relevant as a society tries to grapple with the necessity of rapid change and economic development as part of an overall programme of national regeneration. In the Middle Eastern context, the sustainability and durability of democracy cannot be divorced from the long historical processes understood to embrace culture in its evolving norms, social dichotomies, gender inequalities, as well as conflicting loyalties combining uneven elements of national, political and religious allegiances, traditions of decision- making and state interference, levels of economic growth, colonialism, the ArabIsraeli conflict and present-day globalism. All these factors are enmeshed in a highly complex configuration of interrelated and interdependent elements. Hence, narrating and analysing the emergence and development of democratic norms and institutions has to be situated within an historical process that began to unfold at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By doing so, one is able to gauge and measure the internal pace of democratic change, on the one hand, and try to capture its significance in setting future trends, on the other. Moreover, a history of democracy is meant to rehabilitate local contexts and cultures as analytical instruments capable of shedding light on the ramifications of political practices as well as responses to external challenges. It is generally agreed that he Arab world still faces a number of difficult issues and dilemmas. These extend from the necessity of creating strong bonds of national loyalty to the rights of its men and women in a new world of democratic ideals and practices. Nevertheless, one of our tasks is to deconstruct and dispel the myth of military power as the only means of redeeming failing

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states and disintegrating public systems of governance. The idea that the world is ripe for a new wave of imperialism is a dangerous concept and as such, should be reconsidered in its historical antecedents. It is also in this context that the idea of ‘the other’ should be rehabilitated and explored, not as a simple recognition of difference, but as the emergence of a positive signifier. Dialogic traditions, 19 in both Arab and Western domains, gain their significance as possible channels, but hitherto largely ignored, for bringing into existence a multitude of attitudes and implanting a culture of fluid and flexible identities. It would, moreover, be useful at this stage to dwell on the historical difficulties of the relationship between the Arab world and the West and their implications for delaying or advancing the growth of democratic traditions. Historical narratives sometimes assume as much importance as popular memories. The historical memory of the Arabs, or at least that of their political elites, predates and at the same time embraces Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Consequently, their memory extends across countries and over millennia. Rome, the Byzantine Empire, the Islamic conquests, the crusades, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt and Syria, British colonial policies and French attempts to systematically pulverise Algerian culture and society, to mention only a few, are as vividly remembered and recollected as the latest suppression of Palestinian struggle for self-determination and independence. Furthermore, while Arab societies and communities are prompted by such narratives and recollected memories to admire Western technology and economic progress, this admiration is often attenuated by a heightened perception of aggressively On the significance of dialogical traditions see, for example, Dennis Tedlock, Bruce Mannheim (eds.), The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, (Chicago, 1995). Pioneered by M. M. Bakhtin in his The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, (Austin, 2010) and elaborated by Julia Kristeva as ‘intertextuality’ in her various writings, this approach deserves to be incorporated into Middle Eastern studies and used in our understanding of Islam as a dialogical and intertextual cultural tradition. 19

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conducted foreign policies. The image of the West is sometimes repeatedly fragmented into a litany of horrible tales and repulsive practices. Although the Arabs are not genetically modified or culturally programmed to be anti-western, their emotional and political attitudes towards the West spring from a long list of grievances. Perhaps the most salient of which has been their repeatedly humiliating defeats in the recent past at the hands of ruthlessly efficient Western armies. Hence, to erect barriers of ideological conflict and go on to create an artificially contrived dichotomy of different cultural traditions amounts to turning history into an exercise in political propaganda. It is important to note that cultural differences are not substances imprinted into the genetic code of human beings, reproducing themselves without alteration generation after generation. These differences are often traceable to either social or economic factors and have to be tackled as such. Culture is thus a historical product or construct, revealed by the ingenuity of human beings in their endeavours to transcend their given circumstances or temporary shortcomings. It is for these reasons that protests, demonstrations or mass rallies organised by social groups and political associations act as a register and voice of opposition to the status quo. These protests, demonstrations and politics of opposition embody and foreground an earnest desire for a better future and a human need to strive for ever-extending horizons. In the distant and not too distant past, colonial armies were marshaled and mobilised to deliver an effective response and an unmistakable message. Hence, peaceful protests were often transformed into bloody encounters marking the beginning of a strategy of violence calculated to ape the enemy. At this juncture, it is useful to remember that communal violence, civil wars and widespread disorder punctuated the historical records of almost all cultures and national communities. No culture has a monopoly on either violence or peaceful progress. Proper procedures and institutional arrangements to resolve social and other conflicts should never be considered as beyond the reach of some societies, be they new or old, Christian or Muslim, liberal or authoritarian. The institutions of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could represent the best means of achieving such a successful outcome.

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MULTIPLE IDENTITIES

Nevertheless, it would be a gross simplification to see the west as a monolithic entity or a single structure. Conversely, Islam is a multifaceted culture and a religion coloured by the innumerable and discrete histories of its individual citizens and communal believers. Both the West and Islam represent shorthand constructs that fail to impart to an audience saturated by sound bites and propaganda campaigns the rich varieties of their cultures. When a former CIA director, in a recent interview, regretted the fact that the United States had for long treated the Middle East as ‘a gas station’, 20 one wishes for more frank statements from both sides. Self-criticism is not in this context a regrettable failing but a laudable virtue to be embraced and encouraged. It is no longer a question of losing one’s identity or being submerged by an alien culture. Members of Arab communities may assume multiple identities, and endeavour to blend loyalties cutting across countries and political borders without feeling trepidation of loss or betrayal. In the era of globalisation, it is no longer feasible to reduce an individual or a community to a single identity or cultural allegiance, be it national or religious.

DEMOCRATIC NARRATIVES

Democracy in the Arab World is deemed to have gone through different stages. Each stage is in its turn judged to consist of a number of unique characteristics brought about by a particular historical conjuncture. Although democracy in its early stages was submerged by national struggles or religious reforms, its persistent presence has finally been allowed to emerge as a dominant factor in its own right. Colonialism in its nineteenth century phase was accompanied by an internal movement of reform, which embraced the central states of the Middle East and had as its ultimate aim the creation of viable institutions and a certain degree of economic prosperity throughout the region. It is generally agreed that in the nineteenth http://osdir.com/ml/politics.communism.environmental/200 2-11/msg00279.html, 15 Nov 2002, Accessed 04.04.2015 20

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century Muslim thinkers and statesmen began to recognise the importance of reforming their religion and society as a result of the ascendancy of Europe in the military and economic fields. Hence, modern reform in Islam meant a clear realisation of relative decline in comparison with Western societies, as well as an earnest endeavour to join the modern world with a newly recast belief system. This reform movement embraced the major Muslim states and their urban centres. Ottoman sultans and statesmen who were anxious to keep pace with European advances in the military fields first initiated it. However, this initial attempt led in the process to lively debates within the ranks of the religious establishment itself, pitting reformists against conservatives. The repercussions of these debates engulfed the principal urban centres of the Islamic world, particularly in India, Iran, Egypt and North Africa. Consequently, Islam was restated or reinterpreted in the light of the efforts of both Muslim statesmen and religious leaders. Covering a wide spectrum of theoretical and practical issues, these debates ranged from the applicability of Islamic law in the modern world, to the viability of Islam itself within a new international order composed of independent states and secular forms of government. Islamic reformers justified their undertaking by deploying a number of theoretical and methodological tools. Whereas the strategies pursued did succeed in achieving some of their stated aims, their partial success served to sow the seeds of more radical movements, such as nationalism, liberalism, socialism and religious fundamentalism. One salient outcome of these debates and endeavours seems to relate to the manner in which reformist Islam gave legitimacy to the concept of nationality as a politically acquired right built on the consensus of the members of the community, closely associated with a certain territory as opposed to religious, sectarian or tribal affiliations. 21 For more details, see, Youssef M. Choueiri, Islamic Fundamentalism. The Story of Islamist Movements, (London – New York, 2010), pp. 35–63. 21

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The first stage or moment, extending from 1820 to 1905, had thus an overriding concern, articulated to curb the arbitrary powers of the Ottoman sultan, his local governors, or that of his equivalent in independent provinces, such as Morocco. Such a drive for curbing arbitrary political power, undertaken by high-ranking officials, culminated in an elaborate theoretical justification referred to as the necessity of consultation or shura. Although Qur’anic and Islamic traditions were cited to legitimise and extol the benefits of shura, its applications, particularly in their institutional dimensions, were based on modern models deemed to have brought about an era of stability and prosperity in other countries. Consequently, the idea of consultation and its translation into concrete institutional forms became the product of a programme of modernisation launched to preserve or regain independence in the face of external pressure or direct intervention. Nevertheless, the idea of consultation or its practical application was sometimes transcended by calls for an accountable system of government or constitutional monarchy. This scheme of things (the Ottoman Empire in 1876, and Egypt in 1882) prefigured or anticipated the onset of the second stage. In this second stage or moment (1905–1952), the struggle for independence was inextricably entwined with the necessity of promulgating a liberal constitution as the ultimate reward of a newly liberated country. Moreover, for the first time fully developed political parties were founded as instruments of national liberation as well as the legitimate representatives of the popular will. Multi-party politics, pluralistic forms of governance, freedom of association, clearly delineated laws enshrining citizens’ rights and state duties were adopted as an integral part of a new national order and independent nationhood. Thus, liberalism in the Arab world led in due course to the politicisation of a wider circle of social groups and new popular representatives. This was all the more so in view of the introduction and holding of elections as a regular feature of political life. Liberalism, both as a set of ideas and a process of government, was embraced in the Arab world in the wake of achieving full or semi-independence in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Morocco and Kuwait. Its adoption signified the advent of new social forces and the birth of a more mature political culture. However, marred by a system of patronage and the

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exclusion of women, overwhelmed by intractable economic problems and burdened with its own failure to ensure the creation of sufficient armed forces, it began to lose its legitimacy or popular appeal. The defeat of seven Arab armies in 1948 and their consequent failure to prevent the establishment of the Israeli state or the displacement of the Palestinians signaled the end of an entire era. Although liberal politics lingered on in a number of Arab countries for another decade or so, the arrival of a third moment was unmistakably underlined in more than one way. The interim period that followed (1950–1970) was dominated by radical nationalism and socialism, the implementation of which was shouldered by military elites or ideological parties. Their hostility to liberal democratic practices was made an article of faith, whereby scant regard was paid to liberal values or proper democratic procedures. However, the mobilisation of large sections of the population, albeit in an intermittent fashion, as well as their stress on the equality of all citizens, including women, paved the way for a more sophisticated and more inclusive form of politics. The ascendancy of these military elites and authoritarian political parties was often contested and eventually cut short by a combination of factors. The first factor was the slow but steady rise of a new block of oil-producing countries. Apart from wielding political influence as they began to flex their financial muscles, these oil producers offered their own rival version of welfare policies, regional co-operation and international allegiances. Furthermore, their steady rise, despite outmoded forms of governance, was boosted by the crushing defeat of both Syria and Egypt by Israel in 1967. Such a defeat dealt a severe blow to the political potency of radical nationalism and tarred the image of its socialist programme. The authority and legitimacy of authoritarian nationalist regimes was further eroded when economic growth began to falter, failing to stem the tide of unemployed youth or meet the needs of an ever-increasing population. The economic stagnation of the Soviet Union and its eventual collapse did not enhance the prospects of Arab socialism, thereby precluding its consolidation as the new wave of the future. Globalisation and a new age of democracy had arrived. By the mid-1980s two new models were being offered as alternative projects for a new scheme of things: Islamism and social democracy. While Islamism did not postulate democracy as one of

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its priorities, its raison d’etre was predicated on the failure of Westernised and secular elites to engage their own indigenous culture and its social carriers in a meaningful dialogue and political participation. Such a diagnosis, despite its sweeping nature, tallied with the approach proffered by a new generation of middle class background and its call for regenerating civil society. It was at this juncture that woman, minorities and other marginalised groups began to articulate their own agenda and carve out an independent political space. In the third stage or moment (1980–1990), attention consequently shifted to the relationship between state and society and the function of both in either hindering or facilitating the establishment of democracy. Perhaps the most noteworthy discovery of this period, and after so many false dawns, is the idea of civil society. This is the belief that society should be allowed to develop at its own pace, create its own institutions and determine its own future as an autonomous entity.

ISLAM AND DEMOCRACY

The concept of the rule of law in an open civil society, propounded by a new generation of political activists and members of the Intelligentsia, is a promising and highly plausible point of departure. The twin concepts of civil society and the rule of law bring together secular and religious elements, paving the way for the emergence of a new middle class largely imbued with a new civic consciousness capable of reconciling both Islam and Western cultures. Moreover, the idea of discovering a dialogic tradition in Arab culture is premised on the assumption that the creative impulse of Islam flourishes whenever a positive mode of dialogue is introduced and established. On the other hand, periods of relative decline, regression or stagnation are distinguished by the dominance of a monologic mode. A dialogue takes place within a certain historical context carried forward by new social groups. A dialogue is a positive sign. Creativity itself presupposes the ability and willingness to borrow from, assimilate and engage ‘the other’ in a fruitful, meaningful dialogue. The foundation of Islam itself was built on conducting a wide-ranging dialogue with pagans, Jews and Christians. By assimilating and transcending his beliefs at the same time, ‘the other’ is allowed to retain a foothold in the new religion

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bearing witness to its openness and tolerance. For example, the retention of pilgrimage rites and the centrality of Mecca, the adoption of Abraham as the founding father of monotheism, and the idea of Jesus as the word of God and Virgin Mary as chaste and pure women, are all indications of a dialogic tradition based on assimilation and transcendence. In the aftermath of the formative period, what is known as historical Islam came into its own in a new setting characterised by a social partnership embracing political elites, merchant communities, religious leaders and members of a new intelligentsia. In this period, Islam related the individual to one single cosmos by means of the state as the guarantor of order and stability. By postulating the presence of a chain of being 22 linking the plant, animal and human kingdoms to the planets and the First Intellect, historical Islam perceived the pursuit of knowledge in all its manifestations as a religious and practical duty. 23 Hence, an optimistic mood pervaded the whole enterprise, paving the way for reverential and serious engagements with the world in order to create new avenues of human activities. In other words, instead of restricting human curiosity, inventiveness and activity, legal, philosophical, moral and scientific theories were expounded and elaborated to allow the embodiment of as many permissible acts and pursuits as possible. As a result, human knowledge flourished and economic prosperity made itself felt as a sign of good government. Later historians would look back at this period with great admiration and appreciation, dubbing it ‘the golden age’ of Islam and Arab culture. 24 Whereas Islam in its first dialogue engaged pagans, Jews and Christians, in its second dialogue the rich legacy and secular heritage of Persia, India, China, Greece and Byzantium were For the significance of this concept in Islamic culture, see Aziz Al-Azmeh, Arab Thought and Islamic Societies, (London, 1986). 23 Such a concept formed part of European intellectual traditions down to the eighteenth century. This is persuasively expounded in A. D. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, (Cambridge, 1936). 24 See, for example, Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the ʿAbbasid Empire, (New York, 2009). 22

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brought together, studied with care and interest, enriched and turned into a common strand of human ingenuity to be passed on to future generations. This was truly an age of diversity and cosmopolitanism. 25 No precise cut-off point could be assigned to the conclusion of this age, but beginning with the eighteenth century a certain state of decline was visible or detectable in almost all fields of human endeavour. This state became glaringly obvious when comparisons were made with contemporaneous European societies. In this third phase, modernity has engaged Arabs and Muslims at all levels of their social, political and economic life. On the other hand, since its inception, Islam can be shown to have entered the territory of ‘the other’, mingled with its institutions and tried to understand its sources of strength and power. After so many false dawns and repeated failures, democracy has been embraced, sometimes hurriedly and superficially, as an antidote and a new dawn. Nevertheless, this third dialogue, as the preceding ones, has been opposed and questioned by various forces anxious to isolate Islam in the name of authenticity and ever-lasting purity. It is thus essential to locate Islam, as well as democracy, in their historical and human contexts in order to discover and delineate their early evolution and subsequent development. In other words, it is important to deal with Islam not as a frozen moment in history, be it in its early, middle or late periods, but as an unfolding discourse and movement. Such a discourse, engendered as a process rather than the result of a particular event, contained within it two complementary elements. One element had the potential of being reinterpreted and thus reassured of survival in a new set of circumstances. The other, being less abstract and historically bound had to be discarded for either its anachronism or inherent inability to evolve. The former includes, for example, the rule of law and the necessity of consultation, while the latter embraces slavery or the modern idea of the nation-state. It is thus highly essential to understand how the spiritual and symbolic discourse of Islam evolved over time, and how it acquired novel Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vols.1&2, (Chicago, 1974). 25

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qualities and features as it did so. Islam has always been redefined and reinterpreted in order to meet new circumstances or reassert its relevance to inevitable developments. Furthermore, contemporary Islam is in the throes of radical changes that are in the process of transforming its societies, on the one hand, and its relationship with the world at large, on the other. In a world dominated by globalisation in the economic and cultural fields, the idea of renewing Islam in order to respond more adequately to the challenges of modernity, or western culture and technology, depends on a number of conditions that may determine the success or failure of such an endeavour. We who live in Western societies and have tried to probe its different levels and dimensions have the advantage of offering a more realistic depiction of globalisation, multi-culturalism and world terrorism. Arab communities in the New World or Europe are well aware of the absurdity of a reductionism that deploys curt statements intended to turn entire human societies and rich historical experiences into essences that never vary or evolve. Moreover, Arab communities, driven to migration by either political or economic factors, and/or living in the West, should represent a glimpse of the future of their countries, rather than their past. Instead of insisting on carrying the burden of the past or its negative echoes, they possess a unique opportunity to demonstrate the genuine characteristics of their culture: tolerance, hard work, social integration and a boundless belief in human progress. In the New World, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and Europe, the vast majority of these communities express an abiding curiosity to learn, discover and innovate by actively interacting with their adopted societies. Irrespective of the clamour of some isolated voices, they more often than not heed the call of their rational heritage, without hesitation or agonising questions over the moral implications of their decisions. By exercising their civic and human duties, they carry forward and renew the deep-rooted values of their countries of origin. For they know, or should know, that Arab culture in its historical and modern incarnations, affords powerful arguments to shun racism, discrimination, isolation and acts of violence directed against innocent civilians. In the era of global channels of communication, trade and knowledge, both the Arabs and the West should initiate a wide-

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ranging assessment of their common interests and destinies. While Arabs at large should assume responsibility for bringing about such a transformation as active agents fully engaged in determining their future, the other party in this new phase, be it a religion, a civilisation or a bloc of states, should also be aware of the pitfalls of conducting a dialogue of the deaf or preaching a message of open warfare. It is to be hoped that this new phase will still end on a note of optimism and peaceful progress, despite present difficulties and escalating cycles of violence. The emergence of democracy as a dominant discourse and political programme in the Arab world signals the relegation of purely nationalist or religious fields of operation to a new cycle of soul-searching and self-criticism. Being subsumed under an overarching strategy of action and human aspirations, nationalism is gradually being reinvented to search for its lost alter ego or democratic values and practices, while religion will survive its hour of trial by performing a creative act of reconciling itself to the same global configuration of human rights and the equality of men and women in society at large.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aziz Al-Azmeh, Arab Thought and Islamic Societies, (London, 1986). ———, Ibn Khaldun: An Essay in Reinterpretation, (London, 1990). M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays, (Austin, 2010). Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the ʿAbbasid Empire, (New York, 2009). Youssef M. Choueiri, Arab Nationalism: A History, (Oxford, 2005). ———, Islamic Fundamentalism. The Story of Islamist Movements, (London – New York, 2010). F. Gregory Gause III, ‘Why Middle East Studies Missed the Arab Spring?’, Foreign Affairs, 90/4 (2011). Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Polity, (Cambridge, 1991). Khair el-Din Hasseb (ed.), The Arab Spring: Critical Analyses, (London, 2015). Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Vols.1&2, (Chicago, 1974).

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Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, (Cambridge, 1990). Salwa Ismail, ‘Urban Subalterns in the Arab Revolutions: Cairo and Damascus in Comparative Perspective’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 55/4 (2013). George Joffe, ‘The Arab Spring in North Africa: origins and prospects’, The Journal of North African Studies, 16/4 (2011). Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib. An Interpretive Essay, (Princeton, 1977). Daniel Lerner, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East, (New York, 1958). A. D. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being, (Cambridge, 1936). John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, Everyman, (London, 1910). Jr. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, (Harmondsworth, 1966). Lin Noueihed, Charles Warren, The Battle for The Arab Spring, (New Haven, 2012). Olivier Roy, ‘The Transformation of the Arab World’, Journal of Democracy, 23/3 (2012). Yossi Shain, Juan J. Linz, Between States: Interim Governments and Democratic Transitions, (New York, 1995). Dennis Tedlock, Bruce Mannheim (eds.), The Dialogic Emergence of Culture, (Chicago, 1995). Michael Willis, Politics and Power in the Maghreb: Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco from Independence to the Arab Spring, (Oxford, 2014). Benjamin Weiser,‘Third Wave’-Democracies in Latin America. The impact of socio-economic development on democratization, (Verlag, 2014). Sami Zubaida, ‘The Arab Spring in the Historical Context of Middle East Politics’, Economy and Society, 41/4 (2012).